Electronic musicians and other media mavens have an insatiable appetite for data storage. Digital audio consumes more and more as sampling rates and bit depths increase, and high definition video is a real data hog. Hard disks and solid-state memory are getting cheaper all the time, but what about optical discs? The best we have at the moment is Blu-ray, with 25 GB per layer and a maximum of two layers. Even when more layers become feasible, the capacity of a Blu-ray disc will probably top out at 100 or 200 GB.

If recent experiments at General Electric Research  are any indication, the next generation of optical discs will far exceed this limit. GE scientists have developed a new material that can store data holographically, leading to a capacity of 500 GB on a disc the size of a DVD or Blu-ray. This is equivalent to the capacity of 20 single-layer Blu-ray discs or more than 100 singlelayer DVDs. Even better, the GE disc can be recorded and read by optical systems that are very similar to current read/write technologies.