You could store a whole lot of stuff on a one-terabyte computer disc-say, a million novels, 250,000 MP3 song files, or hundreds of full-length movies. A Lucent Technologies spinoff is hoping to bring you that kind of capacity using a long-talked-about technology: holographic storage, in which a laser records data in three dimensions on a polymer medium. The technology can store up to 300 times as much data as traditional optical drives of the same physical size, and the startup, Longmont, CO-based InPhase Technologies, says it will start selling the holographic drives next year.

InPhase's initial product, with discs capable of storing 200 gigabytes and reading and writing data four times as fast as today's DVDs-will be relatively expensive and marketed to companies and government agencies. Because they can read large chunks of data at high rates, the drives could be ideal for uses such as image searching and comparison. InPhase's first target market will be organizations with large image-archiving needs, such as the mapmaking agency that supports the U.S. defense and intelligence communities.