Mempile’s TeraDiscBlue-Ray has certainly pushed our perceptions of what a 5.25″ optical disc can hold, but a new technology from an Israeli company is about to dwarf the current 50-GB limit.

Mempile says it’s able to fit an astonishing 1 TeraByte onto a disc the same size as existing CDs and DVDs.  This is 20 times that of the largest Blue-Ray discs available.  The capacity is achieved using a new technology employing 200 five-gigabyte layers, each only a few microns apart.  The discs are completely transparent to the red lasers which are used in the necessary recorder.

The prototype has already been made to hold a whopping 800 GigaBytes of data, and Mempile says they will break the 1TB barrier before moving on to bigger projects.  These discs will come with an expected lifespan of 50 years, and could be available to consumers before 2012.

“TeraDisc is made of a material which is highly responsive to two-photon writing and reading.  This allows us to write anywhere in that we can focus a red laser onto the disc, e.g. multiple layers.

When a red laser is focused to a small spot inside the TeraDisc, we can choose if we probe the state of this material (reading , low power) or alter it (writing at higher power). This is very similar to the way a regular CDR works, except for the fact that this is now done in 3D.”

- Dr Beth Erez, Mempile CMO

It’s hard to imagine the disc being used by regular consumers, but considering the amount of data being placed on our home computers, it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine these discs being used for un-attended backups or put into digital jukeboxes and read by any computer on the network.