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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.
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....
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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.
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.
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Large quantity CD/DVD storage solution
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
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.
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.
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:
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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
Use eMule or another P2P network. Lots of users would love to archive your customer data for you.
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.
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...
"Remember, interns are cheaper than actual solutions."
Yes but the shipping to India will inflate costs.
*blink*
You have these at home? And they only cost $25 apiece?
Where did you find the space for a bookshelf that's roughly as long as a seven-storey building is tall? And where did you buy them (or the materials for them)? I don't have the room in my apartment for a twenty-two meter bookshelf, but if the price scales down appropriately, I want in.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
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
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
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