A newly developed computer storage medium released today promises to offer more than a terabyte of storage on a single disc.

Dubbed holographic storage, the technique allows greatly increased data storage and was first proposed in the 1960s.

Now US company InPhase Technologies claims to have built the first media capable of storing data holographically, and is shipping the Tapestry HDS5000 discs to device developers for testing.

"Tapestry HDS5000 is a breakthrough in the marketplace and will satisfy the insatiable demand for low-cost, high-performance, high-capacity data storage," said Nelson Diaz, chief executive at InPhase.

"This will help usher in an era of true all-in-one convergent devices that provide the performance and capacity of commercial products at consumer prices."

Holographic compression is made possible by splitting a blue laser and using the twin beams of light to store much more data on a disc than is possible using conventional techniques. It also offers much faster access.

InPhase is planning a recordable storage device for release in 2006 that stores 200GB of data with a 20MB per second transfer rate, enough for 14 hours of high quality video.

"[This] continues to demonstrate that holographic data storage can take advantage of these new [blue] lasers and still offer much higher capacity and performance," said Wolfgang Schlichting, research director for removable storage at analyst IDC.

"Holographic storage has the potential to become an important next-generation optical storage technology."