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Data Storage Hardware

Cheap On-Line CD/DVD Storage Library? 106

Posted by Cliff from the isn't-there-a-market-for-this dept.
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?"
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Cheap On-Line CD/DVD Storage Library? More

Cheap On-Line CD/DVD Storage Library?

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  • busted (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The MPAA, RIAA and BSA will be knocking on your door shortly.

    P.S. Noone else is a filthy thief like you.

  • turn yourself in, pirate (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08, 2003 @08:27PM (#7664315)

    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.

    Hey, those jukeboxes are expensive, but why pay when you can steal? Sneak into CompUSA at night and "share" yourself a few!

    • Hey, those jukeboxes are expensive, but why pay when you can steal? Sneak into CompUSA at night and "share" yourself a few!

      Sony GPLd their hardware? Lemme atit!

  • Hard Drive? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by frantzdb ( 22281 ) on Monday December 08, 2003 @08:27PM (#7664322) Homepage
    Why not just use a USB or FireWire hard drive? I can't imagine a robotic CD system being cheeper or more convenient.

    • Re:Hard Drive? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )
      exactly.. if needs to be accessed there's not much point in archiving it to bulky jukebox systems. they're bulky and not very convinient. my bro used to have a 4cdrom changer ide drive way baaaaaack in the day. it was kind of cool though, but not that useful even.

      and their existance is also the reason why you don't see too many cheap jukeboxes around. also making them costs money as well.
      • The point is that the Sony system is not really bulky compared to the stuff you normally see on the net. It is not that much taller than a a dvd (5"?) and is the same width as a stereo component. Other storage systems anywhere from 4 to 50 times larger, and do not have the same storage density. ngoy

    • Re:Hard Drive? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jeffkjo1 ( 663413 ) on Monday December 08, 2003 @08:50PM (#7664483) Homepage
      Yea, the only problem with harddrives is they inevitably fail. CD's and DVD's fail also, but if one of them dies, you've lost that one DVD, if your HD dies, you've lost everything.

      I backup frequently for just this purpose, and low and behold, I would also like a better method of storage than putting CD's back on empty spindles.

      • Re:Hard Drive? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by El ( 94934 )
        the only problem with harddrives is they inevitably fail. That's why they invented RAID.
        • So, as other posters have pointed out. A comparable hard drive rig woul dbe like 2000 bucks. Double that for RAID and you are at 4000 bucks.
          • > comparable hard drive rig woul dbe like 2000 bucks.

            Yeah, except he hasn't got anything on DVD-R yet, so why bother even starting? Archive straight to HD, which is a much more sensible thing to do anyway. A lot more reliable than CD/DVD, and can be backed up (to another HD) unattended and very quickly. There's really no excuse to "archive" to CD-R or DVD-R.

      • Re:Hard Drive? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by uradu ( 10768 )
        > Yea, the only problem with harddrives is they inevitably fail.

        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
      • "...if one of them dies, you've lost that one DVD, if your HD dies, you've lost everything."

        Yeah, but if you used CD's instead of DVD's, that would be better. I mean, I've a DVD dies, you've lost 4.7 gigs. If a CD dies, you've only lost 700 megs.

        Which really is what makes zip disks a better alternative. If a zip disk dies, you've only lost 100 megs, not 700.

        The obvious solution? Backup using floppies. It's the only way.
  • I've thought about doing it a few times. Take apart your DVD-burner. Put the parts in a CD Jukebox. They might even fit together without a lot of tinkering.
    • Better yet, mod a coin operated CD jukebox-jukebox. The real thing they put in bars these days. Then rig it to not need money.

      Or leave it coin operated and use it to tax yourself until you have enough money to buy what you've downloaded.

  • Perfect solution - IDE disks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jmac880n ( 659699 ) on Monday December 08, 2003 @08:30PM (#7664342)

    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.

    • 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.

    • price/storage space ratio (Score:5, Insightful)

      by snooo53 ( 663796 ) on Monday December 08, 2003 @09:37PM (#7664828) Journal
      jmac880 hit the nail on the head here. I had the same idea about a jukebox changer a few years back, when hard drives were only in the 1-4 gb range. Load up one with cd-r's and you have enormous storage capacity.

      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.

    • Just for the record, if you look (and I mean look just about anywhere), you can get 7200 RPM IDE drives for around and just under 50 CENTS a gig. So come on, compare building a 400 DVD changer plus the price of burning the actual DVD's (not to mention the enormous amount of time) with that of making a nice RAID 1.5 (or ever just striped RAID, since you obviously don't care much for speed....) setup...
      • Under $.50/GB? Where? Even the lowest listed on PriceWatch (I'd probably never trust the lowest price listed) is $101 for 160GB or just over $.63/GB.

        a nice RAID 1.5 (or ever just striped RAID, since you obviously don't care much for speed....) setup...

        RAID1.5 is too new for me to trust it. I'd stick with good old RAID1 if using only 2 drives and RAID5 if more than 2. And why mention striped RAID (RAID0), that provides zero redundancy and this guy it talking about backups! Also, when comparing hard drive
    • Well, let's see here...

      500 DVD-R disks - $258, total of 2.4TB of information
      400 disk DVD changer - ideally $492, total of 1.9TB of information available

      Total cost for a 2TB, near line storage device: $750. (probably ought to include the cost of a dvd+-r/rw, but it's still under $1000)

      Can you even get 1TB for under $1000? Almost - a 200GB drive is around $150, so you can get 1TB for $1000.

      There are good reasons to consider this sort of storage. Especially if you want to trade off power consump
      • > There are good reasons to consider this sort of storage.

        Not enough to motivate even cheap Chinese manufacturers to bother.
        The cost/GB notwithstanding, the jukebox approach has too many disadvantages. The three from a home user's perspective would be:

        1. concurrent use
        2. speed
        3. reliability

        Since pretty much the only kind of data that would take that much space is multimedia, you have to look at its usage patterns. If you were to store your MP3, movie and pr0n collection on there, you'd have a system t
        • Add a smallish hard drive and do caching...
        • >Not enough to motivate even cheap Chinese manufacturers to bother. >The cost/GB notwithstanding, the jukebox approach has too many disadvantages. But someone came up with this [tigerdirect.com] and it got manufactured. Not that it sells well. It doesn't even read the media!!! I am sure it would cost sony a whole 1 hour of engineering to convert their dvd players to be computer compatible.
    • Thats brilliant so you basically make the iso images then use something similar to: "mount -t iso9660 -o ro,exec,loop image.disk1 /mnt"

  • Please (Score:3, Funny)

    by mike_lynn ( 463952 ) on Monday December 08, 2003 @08:33PM (#7664374)
    Tell me your name and where you live so I can submit it to the BSA/FBI, er ... send you some tips.

  • What are you thinking?! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by LSD-OBS ( 183415 ) on Monday December 08, 2003 @08:42PM (#7664442)
    For sub-$400 (we're talking around $370) you can get yourself a more compact, more convenient and faster mass storage system that'll give you instant access to the equivalent of over 430 x 80min CDs. It's called an IDE hard drive. Specifically the Maxtor 300Gb.

    Maybe you just want to see robotics in action?
    • Bottom line, if you *really* want to keep your data safe, be prepared to spend the cash to do it. As a rough guess, bottom cost would be 4x the cost per gigabyte of current drive technology. (Which is around US$0.75/gigabyte right now, times 4 is $3.00/gigabyte.)

      If you're willing to be cheaper and risk the data, hook (2) USB external drives up and mirror from the primary to the secondary daily. That cost would only be $2.00 per gigabyte or so. (Archival to DVD-R is also an option instead of a second H
  • So you want us to help with your piracy? I can't believe this was even posted as a news item.
    • LOL, I'm not the one that posts stuff on usenet. It is actually for my Paris Hilton porn collection. I haven't found a legimate copy yet of the video but downloaded so much other stuff in the process I need to archive it for later viewing. ;-P ngoy

  • On a related note (Score:4, Interesting)

    by El ( 94934 ) on Monday December 08, 2003 @09:04PM (#7664573)
    I'd be more interested in a device I can stack several audio CDs into at once so I can rip them all to MP3/FLAC/whatever without manually inserting each one. Does anybody else out there with a ~1000 CD collection feel this way?


    By the way, the cheapest way of storing 400 CDs worth of bits is probably a RAID array of hard drives set up for mirroring... some motherboards now support RAID out of the box. 400 CDs x 700MBytes/CD = 280GBytes; that should be no problem. 400 DVDs, on the other hand, would be over 1600Gbytes, that could get pricey... but I don't know anybody who has THAT much porn!

    • Or perhaps you just don't know the extent of your friends' prOn collections!
    • This is close to what you want - perhaps it could be modified to rip instead of copy?

      http://www.summationtechnology.com/orbitmicro.ht m
    • I had a lot of CDs, too -- I just encoded them one by one. It took a month. MP3 encoding (the good kind, VBR, not fixed bitrate) took longer than reading the discs anyway... you don't want to know what 25 instances of LAME running does to your CPU load...
    • I'd be more interested in a device I can stack several audio CDs into at once so I can rip them all to MP3/FLAC/whatever without manually inserting each one. Does anybody else out there with a ~1000 CD collection feel this way?

      Didn't they have something like this for vinyl playback?
    • Something like:

      0. get CDDB information
      1. rip the tracks off of the CD
      2. have the robot change cds
      3. Call this script again

      I ended up doing it by hand, but during that process, I came up with a couple of reasons it won't work. Primary among them is that CDDB (or FreeDB, or whatever) isn't infallible. I think I had fifteen or so CDs that weren't recognized, and some of the entries had misspellings (e.g. is Bjork spelled with or without an umlauf?).

      Yes, I know you can go BACK and change these things,
      • I had to rip my entire collection for the second time because the hard drive I was storing the first effort on puked and died.

        Been there done dat (recently). With (3) decent speed machines I was able to rip a few CDs per hour and plowed through most of the collection in about a week (got odds-n-ends left). Once I was finished ripping, but before I sorted the files out according to genre, I dumped them to DVD-R (as well as QuickPar'ing the files on the DVD), then tossed the CDs back in the storage box
  • 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...

    Translation:

    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 pr0n, pr0n, pr0n, and pr0n...

  • hack it together (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Sparr0 ( 451780 ) <sparr0@gmail.com> on Monday December 08, 2003 @09:14PM (#7664661) Homepage Journal
    get a Dacal CD Library [dacal.com.tw] (150-disc carousel cd changer, minus the CDROM drive) for $100 and spend a few hours and a few bucks building a little robotic arm to move the discs from the library's ejection slot into a CDROM and back. The library can be controlled via USB (proprietary software but it cant be THAT hard to reverse engineer). I have a pair of the old round ones, but have heard the new 'square' ones perform a little better.
    • Very nice! i myself have looked into many options on doing the same thing as the submitter and had looked into the round version of this type of device. The issue with the round one being that it barely pushed cd's out at all... this one however that you can clearly see in their pictures pushes the cd out quite a ways, in fact, probly enough to be grabbed by a slot loading cd-rom drive. Slot Load [alancomputech.com] My only issue with this method is it is extremely hard to find a newer slot load drive, thus your probly not g

    • From the Dacal website FAQ:

      Does CD Library works with computer only?

      No, CD Library no only can work with computer, but also can operate it manually. Just dial the snob on the CD Library and users can see the number changes on the display. ...

      The rest of the web site seems to have quite a bit of translation humor in it as well.

  • 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.
  • Maybe you could try something like this [slashdot.org].

  • SONY=Overpriced consumer CRAP! (Score:4, Informative)

    by bluethundr ( 562578 ) * on Monday December 08, 2003 @09:40PM (#7664846) Homepage Journal
    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)

  • Cliffnotes (Score:3, Funny)

    by man_ls ( 248470 ) on Monday December 08, 2003 @10:21PM (#7665111)
    To summarize the submitter's comments:

    "I have a fetish for breaking copyright law. Music, movies, apps, games, you name it, I've pirated it. I have so much of it that I can't fit it on my hard drive, so I burn it to CDs (soon to be DVDs) and sometimes sell it to my friends and other people over the Internet. CDs are becoming too expensive, so I'm looking for a cheaper way to store more illegal content for less money. Thanks!!!!"

    That's what I got out of it (coming from someone who used to be pretty involved with a distribution site for illegal software, and now has current and valid licenses for every MS product that I use)
    • you name it, I've pirated it

      Sculpture? Architecture? Chip masks? Boat hull designs?
    • For real. He's probably a college student, like I was a few years ago. Despite smoking pot, drinking, skipping class, and cramming for tests, eventually you find that there's still plenty of time left in the day to download shit. So that's what you do with the rest of your time. (Hell, it's not like you've got a job up there and can pay for things all the time.) You think 500GB RAID arrays grow on trees? This guy just cashed in his empties and is looking for an affordable way to keep his .RARs of Leis
      • Speaking of 500GB RAID arrays, I just picked up 2 of them (RAID 6) for $110 total. StorageTek 9393-600 DASD/SVA.

        Eh, if he's a college student, then while it's still not legal or acceptable, it's slightly more understandable. There aren't many college students who can afford to purchase copies of 2003 Enterprise Server and the latest Office suit.
    • He didn't want to get rid of his CDs, he wanted to get a CD jukebox for mass storage.

      I'd had a won copy of Microsoft Windows XP, and a cracked copy of Office XP (from a 30-day trial version they sent me), but I've since migrated to FreeBSD, which didn't cost me a fuckload for shitty broken pieces of crap.
  • First, go pick up this CD organizer [tigerdirect.com]. Holds 100 CDs/DVDs and runs $50. Connects via USB.
    Now run out and spend $20 or so on a slotload DVD-Rom. Now all you have to do is work a little hack magic to place the slotload DVD-ROM where the CD/DVD ejects, and there's your jukebox.
    It's slow, not very hightech, but it'll get the job done and run you $70 or so each.
    I have planned on doing this for quite some time, just haven't had the time to sit and devote to it yet. Be a nice little hack though.
  • ... called a hard drive. Cutting-edge stuff, so you may be spending a little more than $400. Well worth it and slightly faster than CDs.
  • You could probably coble something together with a lego mindstorms, a barcode scanner, and a mysql database for $400. Assuming you have loads of free time on your hands. Otherwise, buy a 300gb maxtor hd and call it good.
  • Get two 150-disc CD carousels, available here [cyberguys.com] or here [cyberguys.com] in the $100 range. Haven't used one myself but looks like the kind of thing you're looking for.
    • Uh, you realize those don't actually read the discs, right? They just spit the disc you want out. The USB connection is so you can use a database to keep track of which disc is in which slot and to have the computer send the command to spit out the correct disc. Or you have a piece of paper with them written down and you punch in the correct number on the keypad. This is like the "Dacal CD Library" someone else posted.

      He might like to have these, if he can't find what he really wants, but having to use a f
      • I do realize these don't read the discs but he needs to phrase his question better if this isn't the kind of thing he wants. I read the question over again and it's still not completely clear that he needs it to read the discs too.

  • RAID boxen... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Zarf ( 5735 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @03:50AM (#7666544) Journal
    you should consider a "network attached storage" solution or a simple IDE RAID solution ... you could go all spiffy and do 300GB hard-drives in a RAID adding more drives as you need more space. You could put this on your home network in it's own system that would be independent of your "workstation."

    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.
  • OK, so this guy is definitely a candidate for some sort of 12 step program (I'm not sure if it's warez or pr0n) but there is a serious question lurking under it all. How do you deal large amounts of back up data if you don't have routine access to a fortune 500 class data center? RAID doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling of safety given the failure rate of IDE drives. SCSI is stupid expensive per gigabyte for the crap he is storing. CD's lack the storage capacity and I've heard anecdotes of failure ther
    • So how do you deal with say 50 times 12 gigabyte chunks or 100 times 1 gigabyte chunks of data which is not particularly valuable but would be expensive and time consuming if you had to recreate it.

      Burn it to DVD-R, adding recovery data using QuickPar [sourceforge.net]. That'll take 33 DVD-Rs.

      For the truly paranoid, setup a 250Gb RAID1 box with an attached USB 250Gb backup drive in a corner and keep copies of the DVDs on it. (Or even multiple external USB drives where you rotate the drives online once per week.)
  • - 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.
    • - 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

      Think of it this way - hard drives cost a bit omre than twice as much as the advertised price.

      Then buy 2 and setup a RAID-1 mirror.

      I recently got two 120GB drives from CompUSA for $60 each (after rebates). I haven't got the RAID card yet but I did put in
  • How about you use Software instead of Hardware...? I use http://nick.spurious.biz/naamah/ for my MP3 CDs... http://videodb.sourceforge.net/ for my dvds Print numbers on the CDs and put them in a cupboard. works for me
  • all you people saying "Just get an IDE hard drive" aren't listening to the poster. He doesn't want that.

    I have 780G of space and it's not enough. Not nearly enough. I would need closer to 4 terabytes, and I have better things to spend my money on. Not to mention I would need about 20 hard drives. How many computers do I need for that?

    If I could get a dvd-rom changer for $400, I'd do it.

  • Back when I had a 486 I had a 6 disc changer from pioneer... it was a cool concept, the only real problem was that it had to tell the OS what every CD was, so it made 6 drives. Then periodically the Windows 95 would go through checking each one (for some reason) so if the CD was being used or not it'd cycle through removing one disc, and loading the next, reading a little bit, and putting it back, etc, for all 6. I'd hope they've figured out better methods if these type of devices exsist now, the same pro
    • My dad's autoshop had the same thing for the Mitchell car repair manuals. It started fitting into one 6 disc cartridge. Then it grew to 2 cartridges. Now, the whole system is 17 CD's! You know what a pain in the ass it is to keep cartridges or cd's clean in an autoshop? Especially when the tech has to switch the cartridges to get to the correct year/make/model? ngoy

  • Options... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cr0sh ( 43134 ) on Tuesday December 09, 2003 @12:40PM (#7669250) Homepage
    As numerous others have pointed out, you have many options. Personally, I like the "hack an audio jukebox" and "hack the USB jukebox" options. For ease, the USB one would probably be it. As you have probably noted already (and others here have as well), the cost for real jukebox cdrom systems are *insane*, considering what is really in them.

    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?

    • >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?

      Two kids, one wife, four dogs. Although four wives, one kid, and two dogs could work also. Seriously though, I have other hobbies, including woodworking, electronics (although not on the scale to allow me to make a robotic changer as some have suggested), photography, etc... My next big thing to buy is
      • Ok - then you are making things: now show others how to do it. It doesn't take much. If you take a look at my site, you will *easily* see that I have done it (however, I will concede that I don't have kids - only a wife and a dog). I have all kinds of projects, both software based and hardware based, and I put my stuff up that I learn and use, and my knowledge - so that others may gain.

        That information you would want to save, on multiple backups, possibly. I keep a copy of my stuff on a few CDs (I have a to

  • Lego Mindstorms!
    Or this http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/changer.html
  • It's not quite what you asked for but it's close: Disc Stakka from Opdicom [opdicom.com] is an automated CD/DVD carousel. It holds 100 disks and is stackable to 5 units (500 disks) with a single USB connection.

    Graham

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