Terabyte hard drives are getting to be old hat… but what about removable media that can store 1Tb of data? It looks like it’s on the way. TDK showed off a 1TB optical disc at Ceatec in Japan last week,

The disc has 16 recording layers, each storing 32GB per side for a total of 1024GB of storage capacity.

Blu-ray discs, by comparison, can handle about 25GB to 50GB.

Unfortunately, TDK’s new discs are about 2-3 times thicker than a Blu-ray disc, which can make them difficult to read using existing disc drives. If and when the company overcomes that problem we could start to see ridiculously high capacity optical discs hit the streets — if people still use removable storage at that point.