The next generation of high capacity storage such as HD-DVD and Blu-ray, will shortly flood the market with storage on a single disk up to 50 GB.  Currently, there is quite a battle on which technology will take the market, much like the Betamax vs. VHS in the 70's.

Hot on their tails though, is a new holographic storage technology from InPhase Technologies that will initially launch with storage on a single disk of 300 GB, six times what the HD-DVD and Blu-ray will provide.  Not only will provide larger storage, it will do so at higher speeds.

InPhase and Hitachi Maxell expects to ship the 300 GB systems in 2006 as their initial offerings of a product line ranging up to 1.6 TB (1,600 GB) on a single disk and transfer rates up to 960 Mb/s.

http://www.inphase-tech.com  

It will be interesting to see where this technology will find itself.  It would be easy to think of for use in high definition video cameras and of course the retail movie business where you could fit up to 12 full-length high definition movies on a single disk.

Finally, it will be possible to backup an entire drive on just one disk again, something I have longed for since the days early days of Microsoft Windows!