The Digital Future

Will Drives Thrive?

One impediment to generating 3D displays is the tremendous amount of code required to store and project them. Fortunately, as quickly as processors are advancing, storage is moving even faster.

"Right now [hard drive capacity] is increasing at over 100 percent per year, and I think that'll keep up for the next handful of years," says IDC's research manager for disk drive storage, Danielle Levitas. By combining magnetic and new forms of optical storage technology, hard drives capable of holding 100 gigs per platter should ship by 2005, Levitas says.

But will we need all this storage if our lives become Internet-based? Morris says that if storage technology outpaces communication technology, it makes sense to keep data retrieval local. But if communication technology moves faster, remote servers will be the way of the future. Rather than storing data on computing devices, we'd grab what we need from online storage depots. Imagine keeping your music collection online and downloading Tony Bennett and Limp Bizkit whenever you want, using portable players and MP3 files. Already, virtual Web drives like IDrive.com and FreeDrive.com offer up to 25MB of free storage.

Morris also envisions storage in another dimension. "We're very interested in the idea of holographic storage," he says. "Instead of storing magnetic bits on a disk's surface, we're going to the third dimension. By using lasers and their interference patterns, we're able to store information in a crystal and read it at a rapid speed." Holographic storage could produce faster data transfers and more efficient searches by using minute changes in light angles to scan vast amounts of data at once.

This is no pipe dream. Holographic storage already exists in research labs, Morris says. Its capacities approach those of today's biggest hard drives, and data transfer rates reach 1GB per second. But the technology is so expensive that it will be several years before consumers can expect to see any practical holographic storage products on the market.

Space Is the Place

"One holographic storage disk will hold millions and millions of holograms. You'll be able to store a large university's entire archives on ten holographic disks. By the time it gets to the desktop, in the outer edge of ten years, transfer rates will be up to 100MB per second. Audio-video applications will drive the need for this type of storage. People are going to need to store hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of video, and we'll be able to make the media very cheap."