GE has announced a breakthrough in holographic storage, which the company believes will bring it much closer to the day when it can store up to 500GB on a single optical disc. Like other efforts that we've covered here on Ars over the years, GE has been working for some time on an optical storage medium that uses holograms to store data in three dimensions; this is in contrast to conventional optical discs, which use layers of pitted metal to encode 2D data patterns that can be read by bouncing a laser off of them.

GE's scientists had reached a point where they were able to use the same types of low-wattage lasers found in conventional DVD and Blu-ray players to read and write holographic data patterns in clear plastic discs, but these holograms didn't reflect enough light to be easily read. The most recent breakthrough came with the use of a new material that's reflective enough to make the holograms readable. Because these holograms reflect laser light much better, the patterns can be scaled down in size to enable storage densities on the order of 500GB.

GE is working toward commercializing the technology, and a New York Times article on the breakthrough suggests that they may be able to bring it to market in the 2011-2012 timeframe.

A 500GB optical disc in two years sounds impressive, but I'm actually having a hard time imagining a volume market for a 500GB disc, either now or in the future. Blu-ray currently offers enough storage to support 1080p playback, which will probably last us at least a decade, if not two. And by the time there's a demand for even higher-quality media, one would hope that our broadband infrastructure will be sufficiently improved that we could digitally distribute data-intensive content (movies, games, music, etc.) with very large file sizes.

So the prospects for a 500GB, mass-market physical medium in 2011 don't seem so hot. Seriously, what would we put on it? If its real-world lifespan is anything like that of the current generation of optical media (i.e., well under ten years), then those who need long-term archiving will stick with magnetic tape.

Obviously, there are very important niche applications for this in the academic and medical imaging communities. But I have no idea if those niches are large enough to support the economies of scale needed to make both the media and the players/burners cheap enough to be worthwhile. It's also the case that many niches that currently need a 500GB medium for data exchange will be connecting to higher-bandwidth networks like Internet2 in the next few years.

But maybe I'm missing something here. If anyone can make the case for a 500GB optical disc in 2011, I'd love to hear it.

Incidentally, my least favorite part of the GE promo materials was the YouTube video that, at one point, declared that 500GB is "4,000 times more data than the human brain retains in a lifetime." So you're telling me that over the course of my entire life, my brain retains 125MB of data? What with the human brain being analog and all, any statistic that purports to say how many bytes of "data" the brain "stores" is bogus; but even if you're going to take some dramatic license and make up a number, it should at least be a very large one. Ultimately, I think we should stick to "libraries of congress" as the standard hyperbolic unit of data storage capacity.