Revolutionary new optical-storage technology currently under development by Mempile, an Israeli company, will allow the equivalent of 250,000 high-quality MP3s or more than 115 DVD-quality movies and about 40 HD movies on a single CD-size medium. While that may seem like an unnecessary amount of capacity for anything but the largest professional needs.

If HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs max out at 50 gigabytes of storage, but Mempile, plans to eventually sell a storage format called TeraDisc that holds one terabyte of data. With 1TB capacity, the TeraDisc looks like a regular CD, except it's chartreuse and see-through. Mempile says its disc will start off able to store 600GB to 700GB and in a year will be able to write 1TB worth of data.

Existing optical disks can only store data on a limited number of defined layers because they rely on light reflection through semi-transparent media.

In contrast, TeraDisc exploits nonlinear two-photon technology to enable 3D recording of data in transparent virtual layers throughout the disk's volume.

The technology isn’t expected to hit the consumer market until 2010, but the thought of recording 1TB on one disc is pretty amazing.