General Electric (GE), the consumer electronics giant from U.S., has achieved a major breakthrough in storage technology with the development of a new technique that will allow large amounts of data on normal discs, reports The New York Times.

If large amounts of data were a very subjective term, here is what the real deal is. The new holographic storage technology developed by GE allows data worth more than 100 DVDs to be stored on a single disc. Considering the standard capacity of DVDs (4.7 GB), that amounts to a colossal 470GB capacity per disc. Mind you, we're talking about almost half terabyte of data per disc.

The product, which GE hopes to bring to the mainstream technology front in the coming years, is still in its testing phases and needs lots of tests to be done before this one gets its final seal of approval. As mentioned earlier, the technology is based on the principle of holographic storage about which you can learn in detail here. In brief, holographic storage is memory stored in three dimensions as well as in the "normal" binary format. The advantage of this kind of storage is that it allows for more data to be packed in the same surface area than allowed by conventional storage technolog.

Holographic storage has the potential to pack data far more densely than conventional optical technology allows. Although the techniques and basic concepts of holographic storage were etched back in the 1960s, it is only now that it is making a "comeback" of sorts.