Researchers at GE Global Research are working on a new holographic storage medium that will eventually store up to a terabyte of your pirated HD movies on a disk that will be almost indistinguishable from any old DVD. In fact, the player that will read this disk will still read CDs and DVDs, quaint though they will be in the future.

This isn't the first holographic storage system that'll hit us, though. Next year, InPhase will bring us 300GB disks that will cost $180 (Rs 8,460) apiece, and will be read by a machine that will cost $18,000 (Rs 84,600). GE hopes to make its offering less shockingly priced.

However, in the day of the cheap terabyte hard drive, why must we worry about optical media? If you're the proud owner of a portable hard drive, ask yourself: when was the last time you burned a DVD?



Source: Technology Review