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?"

Comments

turn yourself in, pirate

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Hard Drive?

[frantzdb]

Why not just use a USB or FireWire hard drive? I can't imagine a robotic CD system being cheeper or more convenient.

Perfect solution - IDE disks

[jmac880n]

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.

price/storage space ratio

[snooo53]

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.