New Delhi, April 28: DVD junkies overwhelmed by the challenges of filing and sorting their discs may find their problem cut to manageable size in four years.

The content of nearly 100 DVDs, or 500 gigabytes, can be packed into a single new type of disc through a significant advance in information storage technology by General Electric (GE), the US multinational.

The microholographic disc, representing the next generation of optical storage technology, will be able to be recorded and read on systems very similar to the conventional DVD players, the company said.

“The day when you can store your entire high-definition movie collection on one disc... is closer than you think,” Brian Lawrence, who leads the GE holographic storage programme, said in a statement issued in the US.

A GE spokesperson told The Telegraph that the laboratory-scale technology is expected to be commercialised in three years. “This is likely to be made available as a commercial product first to archival industry in 2012, and to consumers about a year later,” Todd Alhart said.

“I would call this a breakthrough — no one has achieved this,” said Joby Joseph, associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, who has in the past worked on holographic storage systems, but is not associated with GE.

A DVD stores digital information on its surface, but the holographic technology makes use of the entire volume of the disc, thus extracting more storage space.

The digital information — audio and video coded in zeroes and ones — is stored in the form of three dimensional patterns, or holograms, etched into the disc and read out with an appropriate device, just as DVDs are read out by laser-based readers.

The microholographic storage of 500 gigabytes is about 100 times the 4.7 gigabytes of conventional DVDs. “You could store 20 days of non-stop audio or nearly 50 hours of digital cinema on a single microholographic disc,” Joseph said.

A GE research team has pursued holographic storage technology for six years. The development of materials to support 500 gigabytes of capacity is a major milestone towards the goal of discs that could store up to 1,000 gigabytes, the company said.

“Bottlenecks in materials science have posed a big challenge in this field,” Joseph said. “The scientists would have had to find the material with just the right optical properties that would hold holographic images in thin layers within its volume.”