You know, as any IT pro can tell you, you can never be toorich, too thin or have too much network storage. That's particularly true nowas we're storing music files and large video files. We need to find space forthem and we need to be able to retrieve them and play them back as quickly aswe can. So how are we going to find the storage space for all these large filesgoing forward? Well, one of the challenges we have is that we're maxing out onour existing technology. So we're going to have to move from hard drives as weunderstand them to more of a holographic storage model and that's what I wantto talk about now, and I want to do it by kind of contrasting these two methodsof storage.
You know, what we've been doing over the last 15 years iswriting data basically in two dimensions on a platter, this two dimensions, youthink of a circle and you say where does it go on this circle. It is writing toa disk and as I said this is a mature technology. We've made the disk faster.We've made them smaller. We've increased our ability to write data to thosedisks. But we can see the end of the timeline on this technology and ourability to innovate. So how does holographic storage work? Well, the big changeis that it's three-dimensional, so you're not only looking at things, say inyour x and y, coordinates, but you're looking at them in the z coordinates too,up and down. So you're able to write in a volume rather than just write on aflat surface. Again, since the name is holographic as you'd expect it involvesholograms and since it's a new technology, we're just at the beginning of whatwe can get from it.
So how do we actually create a hologram? Well, unfortunatelyyou need a real artist to be able to give you a good representation. You'regoing to have to bear with my feeble attempts. But look at this, these areshutters, and imagine instead of just 20 or 25 that there were 100s or even1000s of tiny shutters in a grid and that it was possible to open and closeindividual shutters as you need it and then imagine if you had two lasers, onecoming up here and a different type of laser that would be coming up from thisside and what happens is, as the first laser goes though the shutters, sendslight through the shutters, and then it interacts with the light from thesecond laser on the other side, what do you get? You get a hologram, and oncethe hologram is created it can be written and stored on these devices which areoptical cylinders, which allows you to store a three-dimensional image orhologram in a two-dimensional space.
So what's the advantage? Well, in our old world with thehard drive that's spinning round and round like a CD or a record player, youwrite storage, you write data bits in two dimensions. Here, the hologram allowsyou to store the information in three dimensions. It allows you to put muchmore information into a smaller space and to retrieve it more quickly and howmuch data can holographic storage contain? Well, over the next several yearsexperts predict that we'll eventually be able to have terabytes of informationstored in a space no larger than several CDs stacked on top of each other.That's the promise of holographic storage.
