General Electric says it has achieved a breakthrough in digital storage technology that will allow standard-size discs to hold the equivalent of 100 DVDs. I had to read that twice myself. It’s just a laboratory success for now, until it can be made to work in products that can be mass-produced and affordable.

“This could be the next generation of low-cost storage,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.

The work is in the field of holographic storage, an optical process that stores not only three-dimensional images, but the 1’s and 0’s of digital data as well. The data is encoded in light patterns that are stored in a light-sensitive material. The holograms act like microscopic mirrors that refract light patterns when a laser hits them, and each hologram’s recorded data can then be retrieved and deciphered.

[NYT]