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?"
busted (Score:2, Funny)
P.S. Noone else is a filthy thief like you.
turn yourself in, pirate (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Re:turn yourself in, pirate (Score:2)
Sony GPLd their hardware? Lemme atit!
Re:turn yourself in, pirate (Score:2)
From the question:
"I download gigabytes of stuff from Usenet and burn it onto CD's "
What exactly do you think he is downloading gigs of and burning?
I don't think its the informative and always new flame wars on os.advocacy.
Hard Drive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hard Drive? (Score:3, Interesting)
and their existance is also the reason why you don't see too many cheap jukeboxes around. also making them costs money as well.
Re:Hard Drive? (Score:2)
Re:Hard Drive? (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
Re:Hard Drive? (Score:3)
Re:Hard Drive? (Score:2)
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)
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
Re:Hard Drive? (Score:1)
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.
Mod a Sony Changer (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Mod a Sony Changer (Score:2)
Or leave it coin operated and use it to tax yourself until you have enough money to buy what you've downloaded.
Re:Mod a Sony Changer (Score:2)
Re:Mod a Sony Changer (Score:1)
Re:Mod a Sony Changer (Score:2)
For the former though, a duplication station that also incorporates label printing is a better fit than modding a consumer multi-disc changer. You'd want to automate all the time-consuming steps of process.
The submitter though isn't asking for a bulk burner. He's already burned a lot of disks and wants automated access to them. His dubio
Re:Mod a Sony Changer (Score:2)
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.
Re:Perfect solution - IDE disks (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Perfect solution - IDE disks (Score:2)
(at least last time I looked)
Re:Perfect solution - IDE disks (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Perfect solution - IDE disks (Score:2)
Re:Perfect solution - IDE disks (Score:2)
jeez - I thought they were still $15 each.
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:1)
Re:Perfect solution - IDE disks (Score:2)
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
Re:Perfect solution - IDE disks (Score:2)
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
Re:Perfect solution - IDE disks (Score:2)
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
Re:Perfect solution - IDE disks (Score:1)
Re:Perfect solution - IDE disks (Score:2)
Re:Perfect solution - IDE disks (Score:1)
Please (Score:3, Funny)
What are you thinking?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe you just want to see robotics in action?
Re:What are you thinking?! (Score:2)
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
Help with your piracy? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:Help with your piracy? (Score:2)
On a related note (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
Re:On a related note (Score:1)
Re:On a related note (Score:2)
http://www.summationtechnology.com/orbitmicro.h
Re:On a related note (Score:2)
Re:On a related note (Score:2)
Didn't they have something like this for vinyl playback?
Yeah, I went down this road (Score:2)
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,
Re:Yeah, I went down this road (Score:2)
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
Translation... (Score:1)
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)
Re:hack it together (Score:2)
Re:hack it together (Score:2, Funny)
From the Dacal website FAQ:
The rest of the web site seems to have quite a bit of translation humor in it as well.
Here's a solution...kinda (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Here's a solution...kinda (Score:3, Funny)
Legos (Score:2)
SONY=Overpriced consumer CRAP! (Score:4, Informative)
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
Cliffnotes (Score:3, Funny)
"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)
Re:You know what they say about reformed whores... (Score:2)
Heh. No. I got out of it about 3 years before they started enforcing penalties.
It's called, I started making money, joined a professional organization with a code of ethics, and found it to be both (1) not difficult and (2) beneficial to follow it.
Re:Cliffnotes (Score:2)
Sculpture? Architecture? Chip masks? Boat hull designs?
Cut him some slack. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Cut him some slack. (Score:2)
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.
Re:Cut him some slack. (Score:2)
Re:Cut him some slack. (Score:1)
Re:Cut him some slack. (Score:2)
Re:Cliffnotes (Score:1)
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.
CD Organizer, slot load DVD-ROM and some hackin (Score:2)
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.
Re:CD Organizer, slot load DVD-ROM and some hackin (Score:1)
Yeah, it's this new fangled device... (Score:2)
Legos (Score:2)
CD Carousels (Score:1)
Re:CD Carousels (Score:2)
He might like to have these, if he can't find what he really wants, but having to use a f
Re:CD Carousels (Score:2)
Re:CD Carousels (Score:2)
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.
Warez 12 Step (Score:2)
Re:Warez 12 Step (Score:2)
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.)
Why hard drives aren't popular for this: (Score:3, Informative)
- 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.
Re:Why hard drives aren't popular for this: (Score:2)
- 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
Software Solution (Score:1)
Pathetic (Score:1)
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.
I had one on my 486... (Score:1)
Re:I had one on my 486... (Score:2)
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?
Re:Options... (Score:2)
>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
Re:Options... (Score:2)
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
Two Words (Score:2)
Or this http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/changer.html
Disk Stakka (Score:1)
Graham
Re:Next on "Ask Slashdot" (Score:2)