General Electric Company, or GE, the globally acclaimed multinational American technology and services conglomerate has come to the fore with a new technology in the form of micro-holographic storage material and according to its own revelations, this could result in the capacity to store 500 GB of data on a standard DVD-size disc in next to no time. It has to be mentioned that this technology is the outcome of the arduous endeavor of GE Global Research, the technology development arm of the General Electric Co. and it also differs from the existing optical storage like Blu-ray and DVD, which is adept to store data only on the surface of the disc.

What’s more, according to the revelation of GE, holographic storage stores data all over the entire disk in multiple layers, increasing the density of the storage. This leads to the situation where a single disc could possibly contain up to 500 GB of data and this, as stated by GE, is the competence of about 20 single-layer Blu-ray discs or 100 DVDs. On the other hand as per the company, as the hardware and the format of GE’s holographic storage technology are similar to those of current optical storage technology, the micro-holographic players will be backward read-compatible with existing CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

It must be stated, at one fell swoop, that GE is not the first to expose holographic storage. Companies like InPhase Technologies, Longmont, Colo., are, at present, wholeheartedly engaged in producing holographic data storage drives and discs under its Tapestry brand that allow up to 300 GB of data to be stored on a single disc with a transfer rate of 20 MBps.

InPhase’s road map calls for an 800-GB disk with transfer rate of 80 MBps to be available in the next couple of years, followed by a version with a capacity of 1.6 TB per disc and a 120-MBps transfer rate.