New optical-storage technology promises to allow the equivalent of more than 115 DVD-quality movies and about 40 HD movies on a single CD-size medium.

At 200 layers a disc, future versions of the technology will make it possible to store up to 5TB of data on one disc.

Using a special variant of the polymer polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA), Israel-based company Mempile developed discs that it claims are almost entirely transparent to the laser used by its recorder/player.

This allows them to build optical discs with as 200 layers, each containing about 5GB of data. The system uses nonlinear optics, which allows its laser to write to a specific layer without disturbing those above or below it.