And in the news today... 500 Gb holographic optical media.

Yes, that means 100 DVDs on one disc. Blu-Ray? Hmmm - merely one tenth of that capacity and for the most part it still isn't being fully utilised by those who developed it and those who use it as a publishing medium. Then again, that was the situation when DVD first came to the fore. 

This concept has been spoken of for a very long time. In this case, GE is the one who has visibly touted it on the world's stage.Their intent according to the article (link below) is to have media which plays in a device not unlike a conventional CD/DVD/Blu-Ray playback unit.

However, at the last BIG Replitech conference in Hong Kong in 2000 (I think - it was an alcohol-fuelled haze for most attendees), at one of the poorly attended morning business sessions a Doctor from a research facility in China already spoke of this development and how that facility was making progress with a holographic storage media that had potential for a total capacity of one terabyte (1 Tb).

While these super-capacity media certainly excite the technologists among us, they also beg the question "What will you put on it?" After all, it's a very large amount of space and so far the format is read only. This puts us right back at the conundrum initially faced by the Sony Philips alliance just before the dawn of CD.

CD was proposed as a twelve inch (300 mm) platter initially, instead of the 120 mm platter which we all know and love. Before they had considered the smaller form factor, their fear was that the 12 inch version would be unmarketable as it would contain say five albums and therefore have a retail cost far beyond that of the normal consumer. 

These super-capacity 120 mm discs also face a similar challenge. 

Some smaller disc based systems have seen the market but have not progressed beyond special applications. Sony's UMD used in PSP is one of those. The great and epic fail in the global market was MiniDisc - the real kind, not 80 mm CD which is often described by the same moniker. So far, no smaller form-factor optical media has risen to the fore commercially.

While I salute those pioneering techs for creating something so wonderful, it still leaves me feeling empty because there is presently no reasonable commerical application for the technology, aside from patents.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/100-dvds-stored-on-just-one-disc/2009/04/28/1240684451653.html