GE develops 500GB holographic disk

GE is working on new type of optical storage media – holographic disk. Few days ago GE has announced a breakthrough in research and have demonstrated a disk (standard DVD size) that holds 500 GB of data.
This is very good news for businesses, in particular when it comes to backing up huge volumes of data. In any case this is great news since it is very different method of storing data compared to standard CD/DV/BlueRay disks.
In this video you can hear how does it work.

The process works by imprinting chemical changes in the form of patterns –- holograms –- within the disc. Those holograms are then read by lasers, similar to the ones in Blu-ray players. In fact, at 500GB, these holographic discs could offer 20 times the capacity of a single-layer Blu-ray disc.

There are some comments on the web that this is not that important because you can deliver the HD movies on flash memory devices. That is true, flash memory is cheap and capacity is constantly increasing. But they are missing the data side of optical media.
Considering the development of optical storage from CD to BlueRay it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect new types of disks quite soon with capacities of serveral TB on a single disk. Only time will tell if we were right.