Cheap On-Line CD/DVD Storage Library?

ngoy asks: "I download gigabytes of stuff from Usenet and burn it onto CD's (and soon DVD's). I have countless numbers of spindles filled with apps, games, MP3's, and so forth. Does anyone know of a cheap (sub $400) storage library that can hold 300 CD's or more and is smaller than the refrigerator sized libraries of day's old? I know Pioneer used to make a 6 disc CD-ROM changer, based on their car stereo, but that is the largest I have seen for quite a while. Googling for jukeboxes gives me a range of prices starting at $2000 to $6000 on up. Sony makes consumer DVD players that have 300 and 400 disc capacities for $500 and $400, why is there not something similar for computers? If you stripped out the A/V stuff from the Sony, you should save another $50 to $100, so theoretically I should be able to buy a changer for around $300. Isn't there a market for such devices?"

Re:Perfect solution - IDE disks

[Omega Hacker]

Because a 400-disc changer loaded with 400 full DVD-R's is almost 1.9 TB. That's $2000 just of drives, not including the machine to put them in. There just isn't much comparison, assuming your requirements are weighted towards huge storage capacity and not high-speed/low-latency access.

If consumer CD/DVD changers for audio/video can be made at $1/slot, there is absolutely no technical reason the read couldn't be replaced with an ATAPI drive. Someone could make a killing selling such a product.

Here's a solution...kinda

[kommakazi]

Buy (find? steal? "aquire"?) and old peice of sh*t server/PC with a SCSI motherboard or card that has a crapload of full size drive bays, fill them up with CD-ROMs, slap in a cheapo network card, install some free flavor of a *nix system and there you go. You can probably make a few of these relatively cheaply if you got the right hook-ups for getting "garbage" PC hardware.

SONY=Overpriced consumer CRAP!

[bluethundr]

Sony makes consumer DVD players that have 300 and 400 disc capacities for $500 and $400,

I must admit, I love standardizing on technologies when it comes to jamming components into my entertainment center. Long ago, I made the ill-advised decision to do so with SONY components. By far the worst purchase I made was the 200 DVD changer (back then a new-ish technology).

A number of things turned me of about this particular unit. For one, one of the most heavily sold features of the unit was it's ability to organize cd/dvds by category (buggy and worked not at all). The slots they gave for naming the DVDs was so sparse that I had to abbreviate the names and hoped I remembered what the ad-hoc acryonyms were meant to stand for. I considered this particularly unforgivable because by the time this box had been made available RAM had been SUPER cheap for a really long time. Then there were the icons they gave you to represent the DVDs in question. They were SOOOO bad and reminded me of my VIC-20 (not even C64!) days in the 80s and looked like they were designed by a derranged child to boot. I considered nearly every "feature" sub-standard and poorly implemented.

Possibly the BEST feature was what I call the "time bomb" feaure. It was like it had a clock counting down to when the warranty expired. Seemingly at 12:01 AM on the day that it did expire the player STOPPED recognizing DVD, scanning through each successive slot until it reports "NO DVD FOUND". Using a store bought DVD cleaner availed me naught. I called Sony support and they were about as useful as ever (that is to say as useful as a chocolate tea-pot) and was told that I had to shell out $150 bux to get the beast fixed. Caveat emptor, indeed! I now realize my naivte in trusting the SONY or for that matter blind faith in any product line. Not even APPLE ;) (j/k)

Why hard drives aren't popular for this:

[jago25_98]

- I think the main reasons people don't like to buy a bigger hard drive are:
- newer interfaces are out there "But I'd be missing out on SATA"
- no space for a new drive so wastage of old drive
- new big hard drive not properly delt with because it's not using the best hardware setup; i.e. it's own DMA cable/slot
p.s:
- own video footage could be a legitamate use
- the issue will probably continue as removable media formats change

- I really don't like the idea of having all my eggs in one basket like you do ith a hard drive. There has been times when I've switched on after a powercut only to find the drive controller no longer works and the only option is to send it off for data recovery; not worth the money since I'm skint but also a great shame to lose.

- Given what I've experienced with hard drives I hate them, they die after 4 or 5 years no matter what you do.
- I just don't trust them. I wouldn't mind them being so unreliable if there was some way to get at the data that doesn't cost company prices
- with CDs even if the metal costing peels off (like I have seen) you can usually still read parts. Unfortunately I'm not aware of a way to read cds in userspace other than windows so a reboot is needed when the kernel freezes...

In summary I suppose satisfactory technology just isn't there.