General Electric has staked a claim to having made a 'breakthrough in digital storage technology' that should see 500GB discs become commercially available.
The microholographic storage technology is still in lab stage, but if it does make the crossover to commercial availability it will dwarf the maximum 50GB Blu-ray capacity and could signal troubled times for the current next-gen beau, especially as the tech used is compatible to CD, DVD and Blu-ray so players would be backwards compatible with the current formats.
There's no solution just yet for a mass market offering with plans primarily targeted towards data intensive business solutions.
Along the same lines, Israeli company Memphile announced in 2007 that it was only a couple of years from creating the first TeraDisc, roomy enough for one terabyte of information. No sign of it yet though.
www.nytimes.com
