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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 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.
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.
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
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.
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)
- 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.
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