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Storage System for Thousands of CDs and DVDs?
Lucy V. asks: "My husband works for a firm in New York that receives customer data on CD and DVD. After copying the data to their server, they are required to retain the original media for several months until the job is delivered and the customer has approved the work.
It is common for the firm to have 30,000 CD's and DVD's on hand at any one time. They are struggling to find a better storage solution than what they have now as the current setup is awkward and requires quite a bit of space. They are removing the media from the jewel case and slipping them into one of those large notebook style disk holders and then storing the notebook on a shelf.
I have spent quite a bit of time doing web searches for CD and DVD storage but nearly all the racks that I find are low capacity ones intended for home use. I have found one vendor called Can-Am that makes a high quality steel drawer system that might fit the bill." Has anyone found (or put together) a storage system that can handle thousands of discs?
How about a bookshelf, or some of the spools that new CDs come in? I would think you could buy those in bulk somewhere.
Buy a few crates of cake containers from a CD or DVD distributor. Then hire an intern. Label each CD with a sequential number and label the cake containers with their sequence number. A simple Excel sheet or simple database can handle mapping a CD with who it came from and the date to a cake container/CD number. The intern then fetches said CD.
Remember, interns are cheaper than actual solutions.
That's the big question. That, and how organized does this need to be? I can think of a couple of surprisingly simple solutions that are easy to keep organized, but it's hard to make recommendations without knowing exactly what they have to work with.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
I can't image there isn't some system like this on a larger scale. If not, I'm sure it could be easily designed. The system would take up more room and require more maintenance that a CD case.
Mr. Universe: "They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal."
"Keep the original CD" sounds like a silly requirement. Why not just upload the contents of the CD to a file server, do a SHA1 hash of the original filesystem on both the CD and the file server, replicate the fuck out of the file server and toss the CD?
I'd bet you could ROI the "don't keep the original CDs" plan to under a year.
Easy. The same as with paper documents. Put them into proper envelopes and boxes and into shelves in some offsite magazine. There are loads of established paper documents storage systems - you label it, put it into database, do monthly check and retire old stuff etc.
You don't need to have quick access to these CDs, you have digital copies on servers so you just need it in emergency.
You need normal storage same as for paper documents.
CD Hook-on Files like these work well. I've seen them used, for example, and cd / video exchange stores, etc.
Maybe something like this might be what you are looking for....
. html
http://www.imation.com/products/disc_stakka/index
- Stack units up to five high to create a tower that holds up to 500 discs without any extra cabling or rebooting your computer.
- Connect towers using powered USB hubs to control over 100 towers (that's over 50,000 discs) from a single computer.
Looks like you need to RTFS: "After copying the data to their server, they are required to retain the original media for several months until the job is delivered and the customer has approved the work."
It looks like you're trying to find a "better way" to store these vast libraries of CD and DVD materials rather than rolling your own. You should contact a company that builds multi-tier racking for books, cd's tapes, x-rays, etc. The companies that make x-ray film libraries in the US do the same thing for other media types as well.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
In Linux, you can store a file on the system that is the ISO image of a CD that you could use to burn another CD. Then, you can mount the file as if it was a drive and have the data available as if it had been inserted into a CD drive. This would enable you to store the CDs and DVDs as online files which can be mounted as needed when data needs to be accessed and unmounted when you are done. If you created a RAID-5 array with large disk drives, you could easily create multi-terabyte drives to store the data. I'm running a 1.3 terabyte file server at home, built from cheap-after-rebate ATA disks.
Large quantity CD/DVD storage solution
Storing the actual physical media seems like a waste of space. Maybe it'd be better to rip the CD's to an ISO, store the ISO on a file server (appropriately tagged and after running a hash check against the media and ISO to ensure you have a perfect copy) and ditch the real media. Ensure the file server is backed up and you have an arguably more robust system (losing the file server means resorting to backup, losing the physical media is a loss forever). Theres no reason why you cant keep the media for a week or month until your sure the server is thoroughly backed up.
Alternatively if you're hell bent on using up real space (tm) you may want to look into the Boltz system. 2400 CD sized items in a rack only a foot deep could lead to some interesting "filing room" options... even if it is slightly more geared toward the home market
WARNING: May contain traces of nut
Maybe this is a bit too low-tech for slashdot, but when cleaning up stacks of empty cd cases, I found that the small white "document storage boxes" that you can get at any office supply store perfectly fit six stacks of CDs in their cases. Just stack the disks into the box, mark them with a "keep until" date and when that rolls around, just toss the whole thing (the boxes only cost about $0.50 each.) Keeps it clean, reduces the time to pull them out of the case, and if you need to recover one, just pull the box that falls into the date range and search that box. Each box holds about 500 discs, so you'd be talking about 60 boxes, which means a decent size file room will store them all.
It's cheap and easy. But probably way too low tech for the slashdot crowd.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Did any of you even read the article? They need to store the physical media, after it has already been archived to another data storage system.
I'd check out any of the big-boys that deal with large-scale, physical storage.
The one company I can think of off the top of my head is Spacesaver. If you've ever seen a hospital's records storage system, it was probably a Spacesaver unit.
They even claim CD/DVD support:
http://www.spacesaver.com/appl_cat.asp?cat_id=4
Behold the glorious bragging rights
How do you scan them in now? Do you put them in an automatic machine, do you have humans sitting there doing the work, etc?
However they come out of the scanning process should direct how to store them.
If you've got humans doing the work then put them back in the jewel case, and drop the case into a filing box that you can store on shelving. Mark that box with a large barcoded sticker. Every week scan all the boxes, and have the system beep when you scan a box due for disposal. Dump the contents into the secure shed bin, and put the box on the pile of empties for new projects.
If you do the scanning automatically,a nd simply have a human de-casing the disc and putting them on a spindle or stack, then buy spindle carriers that can pick up the spindle or stack on the output side and drop the entire thing into a suitably sized box, then do the same as above. (I'd probably go this route anyway rather than the storage in jewel case and big box above).
Look for "cake boxes" that are really spindle CD/DVD boxes, such as the following: cake boxes
Are the CDs/DVDs in small batches or big batches? ie, do you have to store 5 of them together, or 500 together? Is there a great variance (do you accept both customers that give 5 and customers that give 500?).
If you want to spend tens of thousands of dollers then a good engineering firm can design a system that you just feed discs into. It'll then scan them for you, store them, and on regular intervals shred those that have been authorized for shredding. Should take up the space of a large closet or small cubicle for a storage capacity of 5,000 or so discs, and scanning capacity of a few hundred per hour.
-Adam
Can-am is the one. I got a couple of their units recently to handle my own DVD collection (two three drawer units handled my current collection; I'll need to get another soon). No complaints from me. The quality is quite high, and while I'm not particularly fond of the divider/backstop system it does the job.
Like you, I spent rather a lot of time looking for alternatives. There just aren't many good ones.
You're going to keep the CDs for a couple months and only need them for some legal/contract requirement, so you don't need to "file" them. Just get a long metal bar (or bars) and put the CDs on them as they come in. Of course label them and keep a database, but basically once the bar fills up you just start taking them off the back end and check the database whether they can be thrown out. If so, toss. If not, put back either on the back of bar or front.
This is way more space efficient than folders and prevents them from getting 'stuck' to the soft plastic if the environment is bad. It's far cheaper and also easier. A "proper" system will of course have small sections that can be taken out to retreive a particular CD without too much effort... take some out, check with database, do binary search to find CD. This should be such a rare occurrence that the time to locate a particular CD.
If you have other requirements please elaborate... such as having to return the CD when the work is done. If not, this is a great, cheap solution imho.
In my local Ikea, I noticed that the very top warehouse shelf is stacked not with furniture, but with huge boxes of till rolls. I believe it's a legal requirement to keep till rolls for a certain amount of time (for auditability), but the truth is that it's very unlikely that anyone will ever ask to look at them, so they're stored in an efficient to store, inefficient to retrieve method just in case, and once the archive period is over for the whole box, they're pulped.
It sounds like you've got a similar requirement: you might want to get the disk again, but it's most likely you won't ever touch it again until it's time to bin it. Am I right?
In which case, get as many 100 disk spindles as you need.
As you receive disks, put them on the currently filling spindle.
Number the spindles and keep a record (spreadsheet/db/whatever) of which project's disks are on which spindle. Label the spindles with the project names too, so you can reconstruct your spreadsheet if the worst happens.
Every so often, run a query to find spindles which only contain dead projects' disks, and throw away those disks, freeing the spindles for refilling. This means that you could be keeping some disks longer than strictly necessary, but I'm assuming this doesn't matter too much.
If you need to retrieve a specific disk, it's not going to be all that easy, but we've decided that's not a requirement. What's important is that it's easy to regularly identify large units to be discarded.
You can tune this system to suit your needs. You could work in units of 100 disks (i.e. you throw away 100 disks at a time), or you could put 10 spindles in a box and throw away 1000 disks at a time. The larger the unit, the lower the management, but the more space you'll be devoting to disks that are expired but share a box with non-expired disks. It's a bit like selecting a block size for a filesystem -- space efficiency vs. fragmentation.
Just do what all of the other companies are doing. You have customer data, just let it get lost. There are seldom any repercussions, and you get some free PR (no such thing as bad PR).
Bonus if you have social security numbers, credit card numbers, HIPAA info..
In fact, you can sell some of that info to establish a secondary source of income! Last I heard, SSNs were about $5/each.
...getting rid of those CDs and DVDs would be a good idea, just to keep the data from magically escaping the facility and winding up in the hands of some cracker, thief or spammer.
Why do I see potential headlines here?
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.
My solution to that would be to use the 100 disc spools that are often used to package blanks. Slap a date range on the top or side of each and store them in sequence. A fairly compact and low maintenance solution. Physical damage to the disks with this solution is unlikely and climate control is not important for three month data retention.
Filing cabinets, empty paper boxes, and CD envelopes.
Yes, filing cabinets. The kind made for hanging folders. I've got one drawer at home full of CDs. Several hundred, in fact.
Put the CDs in paper envelopes and stack them into the lid from a 10-ream box of paper. I think one box lid will hold around 500 CDs in this manner; I've never tried to fill one up this way so actual results may vary. Stack two filled box lids into a drawer. 10 four-drawer cabinets should be sufficient for storage, and help you keep organized without the stupid CD books.
It will work with jewel cases as well, though obviously require a lot more space.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
The above linked post from the previous discussion is the best answer. Design your system for reuse of the CD sleeves to save money (assign a sleeves number separate from the project/owner/etc number). Keep the sleeves when you destroy the media at the end of the project. When new media arrives, log the room, cabinet and drawer you put it in. The sleeves only need to be sequential in the drawers, so you could have sleeves 1, 2 and 3 all in different cabinets. It doesn't matter, your database tells you where to initially look, and you do a binary search in that drawer to find the one you need.
RTFS Doesn't work they have to keep the original !
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
If everyone agrees on a cryptographic hash, modern technology (and law) often let you toss the physical media as long as you can prove you haven't changed the digital contents. (This is where the concepts of "integrity checks" and "non-repudidation" come in.)
We do this every day with checks, payroll sheets, purchase orders, receipts and all kinds of other tidbits that used to have to have a physical component, but we (and our various industries) got smarter.
I got a $1000 200 CD-ROM jukebox with FireWire. A patched mtx on Linux will expose its control/transfer API, so I wrote a Perl program to extract with cdparanoia, lookup its metadata in FreeDB, and advance discs. The cheap jukebox offered only 2-3x read in DAE mode, so 200 CDs took about 90h, or 3 days. Including 30s per CD to strip the plastic jewelcases, load, then unload into big CD books, which I didn't want to spend two hours twice a week, it took about about 2 months to scan 3000 CDs, including a few hundred "rejects" that needed 1x rereads at the end. Storing the CDs to (lossless) FLAC means about 250MB per CD, these days at about $0.23:GB IDE, $60:250GB, or $0.06:CD. Stuff 4 of those into a $150 PIII/850MHz/512MB running Debian. There's no need for performance, because even serving 4 simultaneous songs at 176KBps each won't strain even a cheap system. And the few thousand CDs fit neatly on a shelf in a closet for archive. Including the storage books, we're talking under $500, plus the $1000 jukebox (which your friends can use when you're done).
The real question is the GUI for finding songs and playing back. I wrote a crude one that searches metadata for song, album and artist names. The real key to this whole enterprise will be a frontend that lets us navigate so many songs. Who's got one of those to make the whole journey worthwhile?
--
make install -not war
A warehouse
Lots and lots of shelves.
Back in the day my company used to convert a lot of data for customers converting to our software.
As a service we used to keep the conversion just in case they had a crash and didn't have a backup.
This was when a one gig hard drive was every expensive so we used floppies.
We made shelves out of old floppy disk boxes and gave each floppy a number. In the customer record we entered the self number, the box number, and the disk number. Don't worry this wasn't any type of personal data. And the customers didn't mind back then. Now the conversion utilities are built into the software so they can convert the data themselves.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Analog storage of 24-36 disks at a time in a small space!
It's pretty obvious that most slashdot readers either can't read the article they are replying to or don't understand the logistics of physical media storage.
You mentioned physical space requirements and organization being one issue but another issue you did not mention is physical security. If you just have a bunch of shelves from ikea lining the office what is stopping someone from just grabbing some CDs and walking off with them? Best bet would be offsite storage and I would recomend Iron Mountain. We maintain over 100,000 full home closing documents with them at any given time and when doing a CBA between their fees and what we would spend on warehouse space and staff it's a no brainer. Since your husband is doing this work for clients I would just pass the fee onto them as a billable expense.
Keep in mind, offsite storage facilities charge money for collection, monthly storage and media retrieval. Retrieval can take up to 3 days, but many offer emergency retrieval that can get you your stuff within a couple hours for a premium. That's why it's good to keep electronic versions on site, which your husband already does.
Cardboard boxes and folders are not a longterm viable option.
Lots of companies make cabinets for large scale archiving for data centers and the like. They don't tend to be cheap, but they can pack them rather densely:
. cfm
m m
http://www.russbassett.com/products/cabinets_disc
http://www.can-am.ca/cdvideo1.htm
There are also moving shelf options, but they normally are for mixed media (tapes, cds, etc), and you have to buy the shelves, then fill it with media packs to hold the type of media you're storing:
http://www.systems-supply.com/nms2k/edpstorage.ht
http://www.russbassett.com/media/products_disc.cf
If you're going for cheap and densely packed, I'd probably re-sleeve them and drop them into a drawered cabinet, but you'll need to make sure they're well organized if you expect to ever find them again.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Netflix already has done this, I'm sure. Dig around, find out how they run their distribution centers, and copy their work. No use reinventing the wheel when someone else already built a business model around keeping track of a crapload of discs.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
I have two bookshelves, roughly 800x2200x200cm, with 50x spindles of optical disks in 5 shelves with 10 stacks of 3 spindles on each shelf. I think the bookshelves were $25 each. I dedicate specific shelves to specific topics, and usually leave 10 or so available slots on each spindle, so it is easy to maintain alphabetic order within a topic.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
You can fit 200 CDs in paper sleeves inside a shoe box. 30,000 CDs would be 150 shoe boxes.
Label each box with a number. Inside have 10 dividers labeled with another number. When a disc comes in you stick it in a box and update your spreadsheet with the two numbers.
I believe that is called "filing". I fail to see what your problem is other than not knowing that.
I'm assuming that you're copying data into your database losing the structure of the original data on the CDs/DVDs. What I recommend is that, when you copy the data over, you also make an image copy of the CD and archive it on hard disk. Then take the original CDs, put them in paper envelopes and drop them in cardboard storage boxes. Very unwieldy if you have to search through them - but if you have the archived image copies, that'll be a very rare occasion indeed.
Use eMule or another P2P network. Lots of users would love to archive your customer data for you.
1. What is your budget? How much are you willing to spend
2. What concerns you the most: spacing, keeping track, hazard prevention?
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
If you have the money and will:
Contract a robotics company to build you a huge multi-disk changer. Take a design similar to those multi-disk changers that hold a hundred disks and just make it bigger. That would cut down on storage space and also make accessing the disks much easer. The investment cost may be high but the end result should pay off in the long run.
Thermal depolymerization - Lazy recycling.
I'll store the data for you. No charge! :-)
Although they are a little on the expensive side (for personal use...), there is nothing better. Each drawer holds lots & lots & lots of CD's, you can stack their two drawer & three drawer models, thay have matching accessory racks (for components or CPUs or ?... , and they have a lock setup that's not too bad (but not crowbar proof...).
Have two units at home for the music collection, works great. Gave away those other cd racks that only held 1-200 CD's, they were just such a waste of floor space...
I'm a big fan of LaserLine's "Media Zone" sleeves. They're sturdy, clear, and slimmer than any jewel case. They can be put on shelves (about 5" tall), and they also make flippable files and hanging file-cabinet pouches for them.
I'm not sure if you can still get them in stores but they can be bought online.
Andrew Lenahan http://www.starblind.com/
Years ago the Washington Post held a contest to find the best system for storing massive CD collections. There were dozens of traditional shelving systems, notebook systems, etc. The winner skipped all that crap, and instead threw out the cases and slid the discs and inserts into ziploc baggies and kept them alphabetized in plastic storage boxes that conveniently fit under the bed. I recently started using a similar system for my huge CD collection, except that I'm using shoeboxes in a closets.
This would probably scale pretty well - use steel shelving systems from any hardware store, cardboard dividers to create sections for each client, a bunch of plastic boxes, and just affix labels to the top of each bag, and put the archive date right onto the label so that old discs can be quickly purged. You can get ziploc bags in bulk at Costco.
I use wooden dowels for spindles, each holds a few hundred CDs. Here is a picture of my current archive spindle (easily detachable). I only have only about a thousand CDs, and no organization (except some natural chronological order).
"Remember, interns are cheaper than actual solutions."
Yes but the shipping to India will inflate costs.
Since this is a real cost to your business, I would give your customers the option of what to do with the original after you get the data off of the cd or dvd:
option 1: throw it away
option 2: return it to customer immediately
option 3: throw it away, but burn a new cd at job completion and return that
option 4: save it until job completion, then return original
then assign modest fee (postage) for option 2, a somewhat punitive add-on cost to option 3, and a really nasty charge for option 4
i imagine that currently a lot of your customers get the cd back a few months later and just throw it out themselves anyway so the effort is wasted a lot of the time. If they really wanted a copy for themselves they can just burn an extra disc in the first place and save the postage.
""Keep the original CD" sounds like a silly requirement."
In this day and age of "faking the evidence" and "losing the E-mail/source code"? It makes perfect sense.
You can get CD storage units that hold 150 CD/DVDs and can be plugged into USB so that you can search through a catalog and recall the CD that way. Here is an example of what I am talking about (http://www.tracertek.com/cdstorage.htm) These aren't the cheapest, but should be the most efficient and cost effective.
Erutangis ym si siht.
For a nominal fee per disc you can send them all to me. I'll store them and you can e-mail me when you need a given disk returned.
In other words, make it "not your problem" and just find someone who wants to do it for you. Save space and time. There's probably even someone out there who is happy to hire an employee and will read them in for you, send the data to your server and store the originals and cut a profit on it.
Assumedly, your business's core competency is not disc storage but rather some other service. Find someone who is or is willing to make it theirs.
Just think of the savings in office space, time spent scanning, maintenance, etc and decide what that's worth to you.
We used to use CD-Rs for archival purposes, have since moved on to large HDD arrays. But I still have the CD-Rs, simply replaced back to the spindles they were shipped on. A simple spreadsheet or database could be made to keep track of which spindle each CD is on. You can't get much more dense than having them laying on top of eachother.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Trying to look smart, ends up looking stupid. Very stupid.
A company called SSI has exactly what you need.
See: http://www.ssiworld.com/products/products3-en.htm
They even have impressive videos of their products in action. They can handle almost any input format you can imagine. CDs, DVDs -- they'll even handle Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs.
Ian Ameline
> ... as many as 30,000 CDs and DVDs on hand ...
Pththth, amateurs. These guys are storing almost 400,000 AOL cds
is pretty simple, effective, and easy to maintain. Granted, I only have about 1500 DVDs in my system, but I think it would scale pretty easily.
I put them in a case similar to these (the exact ones I use appear to no longer be carried by Best Buy).
In my particular case, I label the DVDs with the content, then write a category and disc # on each sleeve. I created little cardboar dividers that I slip between the categories. I then add the disc to an excel spreadsheet that I keep with the category, disc #, and description of the contents. For 30,000, you might want a database, but for me, a spreadsheet is adequate. I can fit about 300 discs in a box.
I find it very easy to find stuff and I find it very easy to maintain when adding new stuff. I tried the binders, but those were just too much trouble to keep organized and they took up way too much space. Space-wise, you simply can't get much more efficient than this.
just looked under my desk and saw a 50 pack DVD RW. The disks are neatly sitting on a rod in the middle of the packaging tube.
....
:(
Knowing that those damn retailers like to spare space, I would assume that mounting DVD/CD medium on a rod would be quite effective.
Imagine a rod, holding 200-300 discs a piece, with sequential numbers.
When you run your weekly purge, you just remove an entire rod, or part of the contents of a rod (you need to be able to open the rod on both ends)
this is a real FIFO system, that makes it easy to purge the oldest
let's assume a disc is 3mm (it is less, but let's assume it is in a paper/plastic pocket) thick, so 300cds will take up 900mm of space on a rod.....
Hmm I think CDs became the same pain floppies were a few years ago. Nowadays everyone writes a CD instead of using a media that fits the size, on top of that most people do not even know that rewritables exist.
I call my parents in law "environmental terrorists" when they burn a 1Meg file on an 80 minute non RW disc, and they do that at least once a week.... This is typically a file size, you could beam over with your phone, or send in email, still
I wonder how much space is used on those discs that will take up a storage space probably bigger than my living room. I bet if you put them on DVDs it would fit into my car.
We need a dynamic size media, imagine, that when you wrote 80megs on a cd, it would be a lot smaller in diameter than a 700M disc, ok, this is a bit far fetched.....
I have a Can-Am system at home and it works great. It was recommended to me by a friend, who likewise had been using it for some time.
When I got them, you could buy them in 2 and 3 drawer configurations, and you can stack them as high as you want. You can order a base unit with casters so they can be moved easily. If you stack the units, they aren't idiot proof, since the safety lock mechanism only works for each unit. If you open one drawer of a unit, you can't open any other drawers in that unit, but you can open any of the drawers in the units above and below that one.
They are very sturdy. If you take the CDs out of the jewel cases and put them in sleeves you can fit even more into their drawers. They have wire dividers that keep the individual columns of CDs from sliding sidewise that you can space wherever. I love mine!
Netflix put them in file cabinets in rows and rows of disk in sleeves. Each disk is barcode or numbered. Or you can alphabitcally them. You can do a google image search on on netflix to see the look of the cabinet. I run an online dvd rental store at www.ehit.com. If you want to save money on making the boxes, you can have the boxes make out of cardboard to your size and dimension. The cost is really low. And then stock them into a sliding shelf or rack. This way I don't see any problem in store all your dvds in a room. Help this will help! Ray Liu
Seriously, if the parent poster would contact me, I have a way that works great and doesn't cost much.
-- IV
http://www.LinuxMedNews.com Revolutionizing Medical Education and Practice.
Good comments on physical alternatives to the binders. Which I don't think are a -bad- idea in this case.
u mber.pocket_number
Where they may get hung up is keeping track of them.
Here's the answer:
You use a method similar to an IP address where each octet is a symbol to their location.
customer_number.shelf_number.binder_number.page_n
From there you just fill them chronologically. Then you don't run into logistical problems if you try to arrange thing alphabetically. ex. shelf set 1 has customers a-g shelf-set 2 as h-s, etc.
This looks to me more of a process issue (where humans have to stick to a process) than a physical/technical problem.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
dump the ISOs, and tell the lawyers that if they can tell the difference between an original digital file and a bit-identical duplicate, you'll find a storage system for all those CDs/DVDs.
the wonderful thing about digital documents is that they can be duplicated *exactly*; something that's not possible with real documents, which is what that particular bit of legalese that everybody's mouthing off about was written. since there's literally no difference, you're actually storing the original file. forcing your company to hang on to the original media is like requiring that a law firm keep all their paperwork in the original manila folders, and not allowing them to store those folders in file cabinets.
"legalese" is not an excuse for stupidity, and letting people use it that way just encourages bad law.
And the video for the application in question...
A wooden dowel. Drill holes in the wall. Insert dowel. Slide CD's onto said dowel. :)
Does anyone know of a 300 or so cd/dvd changer that is compatible with the PC and Mac so i can just keep all of my software CDs in one unit for when i have to rebuild my system rather than opening all those jewel cases and such?
...Netflix or Blockbuster.
I think that something like a HUGE NAS system would be nice. It would then be possible to store and organize data via customer and/or software type. From there, you could store all the ISOs, loopback mount them as needed and retrieve data. This however, doesn't solve the issue of oodles of CDs and DVDs.
When asked to produce a CD, burn one from the relevant data (or .ISO image of the original)on the server. Copy originals to server as they arrive and then destroy (for privacy/security concerns)
If some auditor has a problem, then say "our reading of the policy (law, rule, whatever) was that the _data_ had to be retained, not the actual medium it arrived on".
Doesn't solve the OP's problem, but defers dealing with thousands of CD's until the first time it's a major audit problem.
Good point i was going to say the same thing.. Either NetFlix or GreenSceen have a very nice set up to hold thousands of DVDs. I am sure something like that combined with a Robotic Arm and a Bar Code Scanner would be the best soultion.
The Imation DiscStakka, I've been hoping they come out with a 1000 disc holder w/ Reader built in
. html
But currently each unit only holds 100 discs, which can be stacked in 5's, It comes with a nice indexing software, although the units have to eject the CD & have you put it into your computers CD or DVD rom drive as there is no built in reader.
Here's the link http://www.imation.com/products/disc_stakka/index
If not, just source some 6' .5" wooden dowel, some long screws and a sheet of plywood. Disk comes in, drop it on a dowel. Dowel fills up, date it. Once it's six months old, unscrew it, carry it (and the discs) to the dumpster, and replace it.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
just ask AOL how they do it. Then again, their storage methord is probably more distributed than the submitter would like. There's also the question on data retention/recovery. I alone must have thrown out about a hundred or so discs or at best used them as coasters.
"It is of particular interest to large organizations that must comply with document-retention laws, such as Sarbanes-Oxley. In these corporations a large volume of documents will be stored for as much as a decade, with no changes and infrequent access. CAS is designed to make the searching for a given document content very quick, and provides an assurance that the retrieved document is identical to the one originally stored. (If the documents were different, their content addresses would differ.) In addition, since data is stored into a CAS system by what it contains, there is never a situation where more than one copy of an identical document exists in storage. By definition, two identical documents have the same content address, and so point to the same storage location."
When someone provides you with a CD or DVD, you copy the .ISO image to CAS and give them back the cookie for that image; the media is either returned or tossed (or ideally, everything winds up being done over the Internet, so no physical media ever exists). The cookie provides proof that the image hasn't been altered (and is better than the physical media, since you could replace a CD with one that you've burned yourself).
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
I have a massive off-site storage facility for my discs, with a capacity of several hundered thousand. There's also a full-time guard who lives on the premises.
Of course, when I say "off-site", I mean in the alley behind my building. And the guard sometimes has to take breaks to panhandle for change, or because he has the DTs. And the only discs I actually store in it are AOL CDs. But otherwise I'm very happy with it.
30000 discs would require 600 of these, for a volume of 52500 in^3. That's the volume of a cube just slighty over a yard on each side.
What's wrong with just numbering the discs, putting them in numbered cakeboxes, and stacking them in the corner of a closet, keeping a record somewhere of which disc is in which cakebox?
The questioner said that the data is copied to the servers for work, and the discs are just kept basically as archives until the project is done, so it doesn't sound like fast access is needed.
I've read a lot of the proposed solutions but many of them seem to miss the mark because it's hard to visualize exactly how large a mass 30,000 CD/DVDs actually is. Given that the maximum thickness of a DVD is 1.5mm she's asking the equivalent question of "How in the hell do I store a ~147.6 ft. tall stack of media?" That is quite a lot of media and I'm assuming that there's a need to get to it in a reasonable amount of time. By reasonable I mean, find the media before the client standing in the lobby gets pissy. At a place I used to work at in a previous life we had rows of shelves where CDs were in paper jackets. The shelves were about 6 inches deep with a little lip at the front end of the shelf to keep the CDs in place and ran the entire length of a well-lit and wide hallway. Each piece of work we did for a client was given a case number and that number was stuck on a plastic card that stuck out a little farther than the paper jackets so you could walk down the hallway until you found the case number and all the associated media was to follow. The trick was to make sure you left a foot or two at the end of each shelf as a buffer space so you didn't have to move a load of media down to the next row when the top one got full (we were trying to keep them in numerical order)...
While this seems an awful lot like many of the other "put it on a shelf" comments, not many people seem to realize that this method will still take up an awful lot of space. For example, you'd need 8 20 ft. shelves to store all that media by itself and probably another 1 or 2 shelves if they're organized as I've said above because of the extra dimension the jackets and plastic cards adds. If you're using commercially available shelves that are much thicker than 6 inches and with the shelves spaced a lot further apart (you only really need about 7 inches of clearance between shelves) you're wasting more room than you're using.
In any case, the best solution is to just suck it up and move to a bigger office if you don't have the room for "media only" shelf space. The CD spindles idea really won't help you save space in the long run, not to mention having to sift through a spindle of 100 CDs just to find the one or two you need not to mention that you'd be leaving most of them less than full from randomly removing CDs.
I have four of the Can Am storage cabinets. They work as advertised, last for years. However, assembly is a little bit of a chore and moving them isn't exactly easy either. It's a love/hate thing but it's hard to find another solution with that volume & modularity.
Read from CD or DVD write to disk protected with RAID.
30,000 DVDs at say 4 GB each is 120,000 GB, or 120 TB.
This is exactly what you need:
DVD Storage Box - Corrugated Cardboard Holds 108 DVDs. 17x11-3/4x15-1/2. "Comes with 2 sets of 6 cell partitions and an interlocking lift-out tray. This allows for easy access to DVDs stored on bottom. Made from 275# test brown corrugated. Comes with a 3" deep cover and die-cut handle holes for easy transport." $11 each.
Then get some standard steel shelving designed for records boxes, and you'll be able to store about 1200 disks per 4 lineal feet of shelf space and still get at the disks. Since they're standard sized records boxes, any records-retention warehouse, like Iron Mountain, can store them for you.
Check out Wright-Line. http://www.wrightline.com/
c tID=35&ProductCategoryID=13&SubCategoryID=0
Something in the Optimedia line should be a winner: http://www.wrightline.com/productDetail.asp?Produ
Their stuff is tough, flexible, and if all else fails they can build you the fixtures you want/need.
Disclaimer: I do NOT work for, nor have ANY relationship with Wright-Line, save having been a satisfied customer in the past.
YMMV.
rick
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The boxes on this page have been on my "to buy" list for a while:
http://www.sleevetown.com/cd-storage.shtml
"I'll say it again for the logic-impaired." -- Larry Wall.
Reports vary, but she at one time owned between 1,060 and 3,000 pairs of shoes; she might be willing to part with a few of the shoeboxes (at size 8 1/2, the boxes are just about right for a CD or DVD -- at least that's the system I use...)
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
A rod. Like a coat-rack. Well plenty of them, have them removable in sections of 100-200 discs, since you dont need frequent access to them. Catalog them and you're done.
Just make sure the room is not exposed to sunlight, and doesn't get too dusty, i.e. keep them away from the floor.
30000 DVDs X 5 GB ISO FILES = 150000 GB
150000 GB / 300 GB = 500 EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES
500 EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES X $114.99 = $57,495
I don't know where they got it, but my local used cd store has a giant rack of CD's on the wall behind the counter. The CD's go in individual slots (sans case), perpendicular to both the wall and the floor. Each slot is numbered. There are maybe 10 rows high, with maybe 25-50 CD's in each row, per foot of wallspace. So with 60-120 feet of wallspace, you could get 30,000 CD's in there. If anyone actually cares, email me at dizman101 *at* gmail *dot* com, and, I'll ask next time I go in there.
One solution...
Something like this will hold 1000+ CD's per unit. There are quite a few companies all over that specialize in media storage and have similar solutions. I found the link above in about 30 seconds by googling "tape media storage". Most of the vendors who do datacenter media storage also carry units that hold CD's.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
which is only emptied every several months
Plenty of DJs haul around tens of thousands of CDs, or used to before MP3 decks matured. There'd plenty of DJ equipment for hauling and stacking CDs.
Get a DJ case which will fold up and stack nicely, and put the CDs in sleeves.
Or, with the same sleves, go with a filing cabinet design, such as what the library uses for microfilm. Here's one example.
I've seen lots of suggestions to use the cake boxes.
I had a different solution for my cdrom needs.
I got one of those 5.25"x5.25" CD boxes and a bunch of little sleves for the cd's. I fit about 100/box. One can get about 7 boxes accross on a 3' wide 2' deep book shelf. You can
fit about 10 shelves in a 6' area. That's 70 boxes of 100 per bookshelf, or 7000 cd's. It would take 5 bookshelves to service the need.
The next bit is the clever part. Assign each one a serial number. Mark it on the sleve and cd/dvd. Use excel, or similar, to log the numbers. This excel will get large, so maybe a database might be in order. Especially one that can tie the serial numbers back to a 'case number' that can then be used to purge the cd's later when the case is resolved. Keep the cd/dvd sorted by number in these boxes. Once a week, purge all the obsolete cd's from this collection. Once a month or quarter, condense the boxes and re-label them. Since you only ever append, the condensing process would be easy.
Since this is a 'paper pushing' excersize, it doesn't have to be perfect. Just good enough to find the cd if the need arises. Keep the 'working copy' on a server somewhere that's read-only for normal day-to-day use.
Try Brodart or Vernon (just a couple of examples) for custom storage solutions for the library market. They're quite happy to sell to anybody, even in small quantities. Searching either site for "CD Storage" should take you to the good stuff.
we designed our own incredibly simply shelves. we are a low budget college radio station that still plays actual CDs and vinyl, as opposed to digital files. one of our members designed these maybe 14 years ago. they allow for easy shuffling because we add about 100 CDs a week to our collection.
c ts/56B6900B-020D-4A82-9E42-5C8D641E59A2.html
not sure if this is quite what you would want, but we have a zillion CDs and these shelves work well. we just keep running out of space to put more.
our shelves are basically 8 feet tall (can be as tall as the ceiling allows) and made from 1"x6" wood at whatever length. we left about 8" between shelves for filing simplicity. in our case that works. if you pull one CD to play it, you rotate the CDs next to it 90 degrees so it's quick to file after your show. that shelf spacing makes them fit DVDs perfectly. the original WKDU shelves were built 4'x8x or 2'x8' because the backerboard sheets come in standard 4x8 foot dimensions (needed for the freestanding shelves).
i have made some for my house and some friends. they would be simple to make, or have made. they literally require a saw, router and some nails or screws. they could be made with nicer wood and stained and whatever, or they can be made cheap for under $40 each 4'x8' shelf.
some pix here of my home brew version:
http://web.mac.com/johnpaul/iWeb/xjohnpaulx/Proje
Obviously to fit the most CDs in the smallest place, you're going to want to crush them or melt them. (Remember, you already have the data backed up, so it's ok!) CDs don't melt so well and tend to give off toxic fumes when heated, so I'd suggest crushing. Here's what you'll need:
Simply aim the chipper at the middle of the room and toss the CDs in after they are backed up. Once a week, smooth everything out with the steam roller. Have fun!
I understand that this is the method your husband is currently using?
p g?v=0
http://static.flickr.com/14/89383054_29028960aa.j
I don't see any problems with it, that's exactly how I do it...
In the record store i worked at we would fit about 7500 discs in two of these stacked on top of each other: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =7543505009&category=3299
(i'm not sure this is the exact model...)
we would buy cases of individual cd sleeves to keep our discs in:
http://www.shop4tech.com/item2161.html
number them sequentially with a sharpie at the top, one disc in each side of the sleeve and you could fit 7500 discs in a shelving system that's about 3 ft. wide and 18" deep... throw a label on the front of each drawer to say the number range, and keep a database of what is where. i think that's the smallest storage area you'll achieve in a very organized manner.
but as said above, you'll probably want an intern to do this for you.
-joe
it's called a landfill
I have been using the Can-Am storage for my CDs since about 1997. I have 3500 CDs in sleeves, not jewel cases, and have space for about 3000 more. It's a great but pricy system.
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
Here are a few solutions http://www.discsox.com/high_capacity.htm#cabinet http://www.jalemafilingsystems.com/multimedia-stor age.html looks really nice
I have found the Vaultz 4 drawer CD cabinet a good solution for our smaller requirement 4,000 disks. Holding 660 disks vertically in a 16X16X14" enclosure it was the best off the shelf solution I could find. As it is a cheep filing cabinet it only works as well as the filing system. They are available at a number of sources including officedepot.
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
Have you checked with the big tape storage silo vendors - Sun/STK?
EMC has a line of equipment for storage tied to an HSM solution that should help you maintain the catelogue of disks/tapes and different performance disk storage.
In 1993, I bought an "optical jukebox" for a very similar purpose. After it fell over on someone and cost the government $250,000 in medical bills, we were able to give it to a different project.
1. A CD (700MB) is a few cents of disk space on modern hard disks. (3 gigs per dollar is common, so 700Mb would cost you less than $0.25) You can easily add a few terrabytes of fault tolerant network attached storage in a box. I'd compare the prices of ready made devices against cases full of SATA drives in a software RAID-5, witha gigabit ethernet connecting them. Copy the CD to a .ISO image on a file server. Check sums against the physical disc and the image. Save the MD5 or SHA sum along side the image for future checking.
.ISO image on disk. (INSTANT ACCESS!)
2. Link from your client's file to the mounted
3. File the physical disc as a backup, keeping track of a disc number, spindle number, and shelf number in your client's file, where you need the CD.
4. If neccessary, burn another copy of out-of-state storage.
Andy Out!
I wonder if there's a system out there which works like a giant CD jukebox, where it keeps all the CDs stored and can robotically find any disc through a database? I know there's systems like this for archiving documents, and some TV stations used to use a system like this with a robotic arm to archive video tapes and automatically load them to run the scheduled shows.
Why lie when you can just make up stuff and claim it to be true?
How does Netflix manage their inventory?
Depends how often you need to retrieve them. If the answer is "basically never" then label them and throw it in a dumpster. If it is the million to one time you need to retrieve one, you hire the interns to go dumpster diving. Okay, use small dumpsters to make it at least more viable.
The Can-Am cabinets are excellent for storage of a lot of media. While you can probably find some other solutions for even higher desity storage, these probably cannot be beat for the price. They are made of a decent gauge steel, so they are heavy duty and can take some abuse. I would say they are better quality construction than most office style file cabinets. And they look good enough for home use, which is where I have mine. You can order them in a variety of configurations and with or without a formica top. They are built to accomodate regular DVD's and CD's in their original retail style packing. However, if you stored the discs in sleeves, you could store a ton of discs in each drawer. Just would probably want to use something as separators for easier indexing.
http://www.ideastreamproducts.com/vaultz/CDCab.htm l
I was in a simliar situation about a year ago. We now have well over 2000 CDs stored nicely in four large chests of drawers. The 4 drawer units is about $120 and then the sleeves (tabbed and individual) where $15/100
Cost for 2000 Disc storage:
4 chests @ 120/piece: $520
20 packages of cd folders @ 15/piece: $300
Total: $820 (free shipping, no tax)
The drawers are pretty sturdy, easily accessed.
Look into:
* the storage methods/solutions for patient records (folders, color coding, space)
* meeting with some olde tyme mainframers or data secretaries to find out their system for handling reels of mag tape.
If operations are dependant on keeping these things around, storage space may have to be/become part of their scope.
However a simple automated parts inventory robot does exist. Previous mentions of "cake trays" means that the robot can store/retrive a cake tray, then the user can sort the disk out of this small quantity. Yes, manual labling would be necessary, but I remember these things on all the items in the grocery store...Oh yea! Bar Codes! Automated labling - just peel and stick! I am sure a numerical code is used to keep track of clients, so it makes sense!
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!
Why not just dowel rods and felt washers? put a threaded handle at the top and tada. Label the handles. Low low tech. E z 2 make.
Reading the thread I see lots of "put 'em in milkcrate" type arguments, and lots of people saying "duplicate them to servers and screw the physical media", in contrast to the question, which states that after duplicating them, they have to keep them.
I'd ask to tour a large radio company. They run off what sounds like NAS based systems now, rather than physical CDs, but I'm sure they have to store them somewhere.
For my part, I wouldh have said booklets. 400CDs per book, 30,000 CDs, 100 booklets, 5" width per book, 500" of shelf space, it's a lot less than a law offices law library. I have about 1000 CDs, in like 4 books, Jewel cases are in boxes in the attic, music is all ripped. This could easily scale to their size especially if someone is being paid to maintain it.
I like music
(...in a mass-market product, with tier-1 commercial support, that is. I'm sure you could hack something together that's both cheaper and higher density, but we'll assume for the moment that this is Important Stuff you're storing, and you care about quality.)
:)
http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4500/
At $70K retail for 24TB that's a better deal than any top tier storage vendor's array you can find. And a rack of 10 of them puppies lists for $471K. I bet you can talk a sales weasel into a bit of a discount, too.
Oh, and it runs Linux. 3
Yikes. I can imagine OSHA having a field day with these powerful shredders. Would like to see the safety rules/mechanisms/documentation/etc for any facility that makes use of these.
Now you have a sliced polyester saussage which needs 'book ends' to stop slumping. One end would be the back of the drawer and the other either a heavy lump or a magnet that sticks to the bottom of the drawer.
What about access? Very simple. You know the dates of arrival so all you do is put a file card with the date on slipped between one day's batch and the next. Or if you seralise and keep a database do the same with each 50 discs. Write the date/serial on the corner of the card and it will show beyond the discs.
Finally if thee is a certain amount of taking out and putting back you take a batch of 100, or a whole saussage and with a marker pen draw a line along the saussage at 12 o'clock in red so putting a small red blob on the edge of all discs. Now take say a blue marker pen and draw a line starting at one end of the saussage at say 11 o'clock and ending at the other end at say 1 o'clock, ie a diagonal line. This means that if a disc is replaced in the wrong position or a bunch have been removed you can see immediately by the discontinuity in the diagonal line.
Aren't there a slashdot FAQ somewhere?
FTFA = (From The Fucking/Fine Article)
I once stored 300 DVDs in a nightstand drawer with sleeves I picked up at CompUSA.
"I'm not a cool person in real life, but I play one on the Internet". Galley
I've looked at all the purpose-built CD racks around, and they are HORRIBLY designed. In earthquake country, you don't put CDs on a flat shelf, and expect them to stay there.
The solution was a cheap, fairly small clothes dresser I found. They're perfectly protected from light, dust, etc., and quite easily accessible still. Plus, you get much more storage on each wall, compared to solutions that are only one CD deep.
The one modification I made was to make it angle backwards by maybe 4 degrees, so even heavy shaking wouldn't possibly cause the drawers to slide all the way out (which could cause it to topple). Large filing cabinets already have such safety interlocks in place.
So, all you need to do is find something with a large number of drawers, which are all only slightly (vertically) deeper than CDs/jewel-cases. Put the discs in paper sleves to save space and money.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Please turn in your nerd badge on your way out.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Christ, I'd just copy the data to my servers and hand the discs back to the customer! Who wrote this unfair contract?
Ah - 98% of their "titles" are out at any given time. So if even one of the discs of The Way Things Go is out the "title" is out. I wonder if that is intentionally misleading so as to get some slack for their turnaround/wait time.
Gee, I didn't know there were all these fancy solutions...
I just used a piece of aluminum pipe hung between two brackets on the wall. We'd slip the CDs on the pipe. Cheap and easy. When the closet got full, we stuck a piece of rope through the pipe and let the CDs slide onto the rope. Made it easy to feed into the shreader. The shreader didn't like the rope, however. We also tried a bonfire, but man those CDs make for a thick black stinky smoke... The hot dogs tasted like crap after that. Plenty of beer solved that...
Place nail here >+
What you're looking for is a specialized Library Media Storage Solution.
Usually provided by Library Furniture Specialists and there are several companies out there.