An optical disk drive (101) is disclosed which has essentially no seek
time. The drive utilizes a Virtual Head (VH) (103) which is capable of
accessing any and/or all tracks in an optical disk (111) at any time. The
drive utilizes a procedure by which all of the tracks (208) in an optical
disk are continuously mapped to a detector (121) space at all times, thus
making data stored on the disk drive available almost instantaneously.
The mapping of the optical disk tracks to the sensor space is direct in
that it is predetermined and is an integral part of the driver software.
The direct mapping makes it possible to use the least amount of
computation time required to access any track. The technique is enabled
by using a combination of a holographic lens element (125) with the
detector. The technique and the components used in this device open the
possibility for rapid data transfers using multidimensional data access.