There's been talk about super high-capacity discs for some time now. TDK even said something about having a 200GB Blu-Ray disc in August. Well, word's just trickled out that this week, Hitachi-Maxell will be organizing a showcase to present their latest offering to the public: their new 300GB holographic CDs.

Now that's a whole lot of space for data. Hitachi-Maxell's new 300GB holographic discs also have a transfer rate of 20MB/sec, combining high-speed transfers with sky-high capacity. These babies will no doubt prove invaluable for storing, say, uncompressed movies and music files that could be edited at a later time.

That's not all, too. InPhase has a second-generation 800GB rewritable optical disc with data transfer rates of about 80MBbps in the works for 2008, with plans to expand its capacity to 1.6TB by 2010.

Of course, with increased capacity comes a proportionately increased price tag. The 300GB discs are expected to fetch a price of around US$ 100 to US$ 125, while the optical drive that'll be used to operate them is expected to have a whopping price of US$ 15,000. Definitely not something that the common everyman can afford right now, but when the second-gen discs roll out, we expect these ones to get a price cut.