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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?"
The MPAA, RIAA and BSA will be knocking on your door shortly.
P.S. Noone else is a filthy thief like you.
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!
Why not just use a USB or FireWire hard drive? I can't imagine a robotic CD system being cheeper or more convenient.
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.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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.
Tell me your name and where you live so I can submit it to the BSA/FBI, er ... send you some tips.
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?
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
So you want us to help with your piracy? I can't believe this was even posted as a news item.
so, you're asking slashdot for help in storing all your porn and warez? what?
So now we know the story of the goat.cx guy!
vi ~/.emacs
Hi, My Name is ngoy and I have a download adiction.
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!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
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...
I know god exists. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
get a Dacal CD Library (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.
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.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
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.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Sony makes consumer DVD players that have 300 and 400 disc capacities for $500 and $400,
;) (j/k)
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
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
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)
It's the same fucking device.
They're the worst kind.
Fuck you very much for your hipocrisy.
Were you too stupid not to get caught, or what?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
First, go pick up this CD organizer. 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.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
... 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.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
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 Leisure Suit Larry and his Return of the King screener online.
And what's wrong with that?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
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 or here in the $100 range. Haven't used one myself but looks like the kind of thing you're looking for.
Omnes arx vestrum sunt adiuncta nobis.
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.
[signature]
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.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
- 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.
A blog I run for the wealth
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
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.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
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 problems with 100+ cds would be impossible!
~Anztac
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?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Lego Mindstorms!
Or this http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/changer.html
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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, but it'll be easier to do on the fly.
The best idea I came up with is to rip the cds to wav files separately from encoding them. Then, while you're sitting there (since you're looking to maximize YOUR time doing this), you can just rip to your heart's content. When you're ready to be away from the computer, set the encoder to encode, and let the processor work in the background, at least from your perspective. Come back later, stop the encoding process, and rip some more, lather, rinse, repeat.
The second best idea, which I ended up implementing, is to do it at work. If you've got a CD burner, bring your CDS into work incrementally, rip four or five a day, burn them to CD, and repeat. It's not fun, but at least you've got a backup. 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. At least this way, you've got a backup. Or, in my case, two.
I'll be doing my entire collection for a third time, probably, since I realized that I don't ALWAYS want VBR 320b/s encoding. 160 or so is just fine for the car or plane, and I'd rather have 10 albums/CD than 5 while mobile anyway. So, I think I have to rerip everything, unless somebody knows how to downsample mp3s.
It's OK, as I also have to get RAID going on my currently nonexistant file server, so it's in the "later" bin.
I should probably go OGG while I'm at it, but, well....
ceci n'est pas un sig.
Who's the troll now?
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
It's not quite what you asked for but it's close: Disc Stakka from Opdicom is an automated CD/DVD carousel. It holds 100 disks and is stackable to 5 units (500 disks) with a single USB connection.
Graham
Graham