Cheap On-Line CD/DVD Storage Library? 106
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?"
Hard Drive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perfect solution - IDE disks (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not buy a couple of cheap 200Gb IDE disks? Prices are drifting to close to $1/Gb. You use the CD/DVD images as backups (your data is probably pretty static, from what you say).
At work, we set up a server devoted to this. We load up ISO images, mount them with the loopback device, and export them via NFS.
Much better than changers. We used several of them before we hit upon this scheme.
What are you thinking?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe you just want to see robotics in action?
Re:Hard Drive? (Score:3, Insightful)
price/storage space ratio (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem now, is that in the current market hard drives are dirt cheap, and are hundreds of times larger in capacity than a cd or even a DVD. It simply doesn't make economic sense to buy a DVD changer (and discs) for $400 or more when you can get somewhere in the neighborhood of a TB of hard drive space for the same amount (even lower than a $1/GB nowadays), not to mention lower seek times and more secure storage (some of those cd-rs I burned 4 years ago are almost unreadable)
Now I do think that a DVD changer would make economic sense if the larger ~27GB capacity DVDs come out soon and their price drops quickly. Then when you're talking about 25-100TB of storage in a changer it makes a lot more economic sense. For right now though, hard drives are the way to go.
Re:Perfect solution - IDE disks (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hard Drive? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, guess what? Your original CDs are still there, as a "backup". Sorry, no matter which way you toss and turn it, the HD solution comes out making more sense. No CD jukebox is going to be as reliable long-term: CDs can get jammed and scratched, the fairly delicate mechanism can break, there's wear and tear on the CDs even if everything works smoothly, and you end up with a system that is SLOW and can only handle ONE CD AT A TIME. A 200GB drive will run you $150 and can hold around 300 CD images, so two drives and a RAID controller still come in under the $400 figure. And you can serve up multiple CDs at the same time.
RAID boxen... (Score:3, Insightful)
OR, you could simply reduce the amount of stuff you keep around. I doubt you really own/use more than a few spindels of stuff. If you had a terabyte raid of your own and managed what you kept on it... keeping only what you need to survive... I'd be impressed if you used the whole thing. How much Music, Movies, and Porn does one person really need?
Maybe I'm talking to the wrong crowd.
Options... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is this?
Well, they aren't priced for you! You see, a successful business doesn't offer just the lowest price on a product, but the lowest price on the product that the market will bear. Apparently, businesses (as a market) are *incredibly stupid*, and will bear the cost of multi-thousand dollar equipment that is probably produced for sub-$500 per unit (one can easily speculate as to the why of this, there are many possible, and probably interrelated, reasons).
Anyhow - you won't be spending this kind of money - so what about other options?
I have a good one: organize your disks and catalog them by a serial number in a database of some sort, and put the disks into Case Logic bindersheets in cheap binders. Store the binders (number the binders, too) on a bookshelf. Build the database so that you have some meta information, the cd number, and the binder number. Select on the meta, return the two numbers (maybe even a page number if you want), and you should be able to easily find the disk you want.
Not high-tech, not on-line, but fairly cheap, and easily expandable and resusable in the future.
The other thing to do: realize that most of your data is worthless. Yeah, MP3s, gamez, warez, pr0nz, whatever - it is worthless. If you want to justify the time/money/etc for a real cdrom/dvd jukebox or hard drive archive solution, then you need worthy data! This is one reason why businesses are willing to spend the money - because the data on those machines is their business. So start making data. Create movies, produce music, express artwork! You only have in front of you the most astounding machine mankind has EVER made!. That, and the rest of your life. Think of what Da Vinci made and left of his life - imagine if he had a computer!
What is stopping you?