Now here's a rate of progress we could get used to. Nary a month after Pioneer trumpeted a 400GB Blu-ray Disc, out pops another press release from the firm boasting about a 500 gigger with a score of layers. Based on research at its Tokyo headquarters, specifications have been drafted for an incredibly capacious 500GB BD. Granted, this very company already had plans for a 500GB optical disc nearly four years ago, but there's no time like the present to make this stuff a reality, right?

[Via TrustedReviews, thanks xdragon]

We're beginning to think that this is some type of holiday tradition for Verbatim, as nearly a year after the firm waved color-background CD-Rs in our faces, now we've got vivid DVD±Rs to tempt us, too. As expected, these new 4.7GB discs are fully compatible with all LightScribe-enabled drives, and they're currently shipping in packs of 25 for around $25. Yeah, it's costly, but it's hard to put a price on the joy you'll receive when finding yellow, blue, red, orange and green discs within your next spindle.

We've heard a lot of talk about the death of optical media, but for inexpensive high-capacity storage, it's pretty hard to beat -- which is why the TeraDisc, from Israel's Mempile, look like it has such promise. Eschewing the reflectivity principles in current optical media entirely, the TeraDisc system uses light-sensitive molecules called chromophores to create hologram-like matrices that can be used to store a full terabyte of data on a single disc using a red laser -- and Mempile says that an eventual transition to a blue laser system will enable storage capacities of up to 5TB. The company is hoping to get a prototype ready in 18 months, and plans to ship the first version a year after that, priced around $3,000 for the drive and $30-60 for a 600GB disc. No word on the price of those 1TB discs, but you can bet they won't be cheap.

Read - Mempile website
Read - In-depth article about TeraDisc at The Future of Things

[Thanks, Iddo]

There was a brief moment in time when unveiling an "optical storage technology that can provide 40 times the capacity of Blu-ray and over 200 times the capacity of DVD" would be momentous, but unfortunately for Call/Recall, it's just one of the herd at this point. Nevertheless, the company is pushing forward in its development of "2-photon 3D technology" that can purportedly stuff many terabytes of data onto a "DVD-sized disc" or even cram 50GB onto a one-inch disc aimed at cellphones and mobile media players. The system relies on a "2-photon recording process to record bits in a three-dimensional volume in a disk," which can stuff multiple layers atop one another in order to give users more room to work with. As expected, there's little to be said about an actual mainstream release of the so-called solution, and besides, we're having a hard enough time swallowing the pricetags of existing high-density storage drives.

Somehow, in a world of 300GB holographic discs being packaged with cereal boxes -- OK, maybe we're not quite there yet -- a 1TB optical disc doesn't sound too terribly far fetched. However, Mempile's upcoming TeraDisc technology deserves no scoffing, with its 100 virtual layers for storage at a "fraction of the price" of other storage solutions on the market. Currently the disc can store 500GB in a transparent disc the thickness of a DVD, but future optimizations will allow for 200 layers of data, with 5GB on each layer, for a whole terabyte of good times. The capacity improvements come from the fact that the disc is transparent, so the laser doesn't have to bounce off of anything, it just goes right through. Right now the technology is still in development, but "strategic agreements" are already in place with media and device manufacturers, so all we've got to worry about is where to store all these cute kitten pics of ours while we're waiting for these discs to hit shelves.

Good morning, kids. Are you ready for the optical disc format of the day? It's Hitachi Maxell's 1TB stacked volumetric optical disc (SVOD) array, comprised of rather thin DVD-size discswith DVD-size capacities: 9.4GB total storage each on two 92µm thick data layers. Yeah, we know, we promised a terabyte; well, watch and learn. These polycarbonate discs may be too thin to be manufactured from typical plastics, but they can be stacked in an optical array 100 tall, and 6.5 x 13.3 x 16.1cm (2.5 x 5.2 x 6.3-inches) in size. Even though Hitachi Maxell wants to make the terabyte carts relatively cheap at ¥40,000 (about $340 US) and claims there are consumer applications, don't toss that HD DVD player just yet. It's pretty easy to realize why optical arrays are really of only limited utility for the end-user; if these should ever be popularized, we'd imagine it would serve first as data archival medium for businesses before you'd ever outfit your rig with, like, the high def optical disc system, dude.

[Thanks, Andrew]