GE Announces Breakthrough In Holographic Data Storage Performance

The Blu-ray disc is only a few years from winning the battle with HD-DVD to become the defacto format for HD films. Blu-ray discs are also being used when people have a large amount of data on their computer that they need to archive in a small amount of space. One of the key draws to Blu-ray from DVDs and CDs for storage was to get more data in the same physical space for data archival. GE is hard at work on a storage medium that is even higher capacity than the Blu-ray disc.GE Global Research has announced a breakthrough in holographic data storage. The new breakthrough builds on a breakthrough in 2009 that allows up to 500GB of data to be stored on a single CD-sized disk. The problem with the tech in 2009 was that it was too slow for practical use for data archival. The new breakthrough GE is so excited about makes the holographic disc record data as quickly as a Blu-ray does today.

The breakthrough will also advance GEs intent in developing holographic storage technology for the commercial market. It takes a long while to burn data to fill a Blu-ray disc completely. I can only imagine with the ability to store up to 500GB on a single disc how long it would take to fill a holographic disc. A single holographic disc could hold the same amount of data as 20 Blu-ray discs. The data writing speed of holographic discs today is 100x faster than it was in 2009.