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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?"
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"
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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
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
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.