You better not scratch that disk then…

General Electric announced that it made a breakthrough in holographic disc technology, alllowing affordable 500 GB optical discs (!) that measure the size of traditional DVDs.

Rewind… So, one hundred DVD’s on one and the same disc ?
Cool. Until you scratch it

Holographic disc technology is capable of dwarfing traditional optical media due to its density. The discs make use of microscopic holograms encoded with light information, which are then accessed by a laser.

While several tech companies have been developing holographic discs for years, GE’s successful demonstration is significant because its technology uses smaller, less complex holograms, according to the New York Times.

GE expects its holographic disc could make it to mass production in 2011 or 2012, and cost less than 10 cents per gigabyte.

Source: http://www.ge.com/research/grc_2_3_1.html