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Storage System for Thousands of CDs and DVDs?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the more-discs-than-you-can-shake-a-bookshelf-at dept.

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?

2 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. Interns and Cake Containers by daeg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. FIFO is key by 0xABADC0DA · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.