SAN FRANCISCO, April 27 (Xinhua) -- U.S. researchers on Monday announced a breakthrough in optical storage technology which they said may result in the development of 500-gigabyte single disc with the capacity of 100 standard DVDs.

    In a statement, General Electric Company (GE) said its researchers have successfully demonstrated a micro-holographic storage material that can support 500 gigabytes of storage capacity in a standard DVD-size disc.

    "This is equal to the capacity of 20 single-layer Blu-ray discs, 100 DVDs or the hard drive for a large desktop computer," the statement said.

    Unlike today's optical storage formats such as DVDs which store information only on the surface of the disc, holographic storage technology uses the entire volume of the disc material to store holograms, or three-dimensional patterns that represent bits of information, to dramatically increase the storage capacity.

    According to GE, micro-holographic discs can be read or recorded on systems similar to a typical DVD player, meaning that micro-holographic players in the future may also enable consumers to play back their CDs, DVDs and Blue-ray discs.