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?

Comments

Interns and Cake Containers

[daeg]

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.

Re:Interns and Cake Containers

[CodemasterMM]

Hey, I'm an intern currently!

Wait... I've been making labels for the past two weeks.
Crap, he's right.

Imation Disc Stakka

[Fbelch]

Maybe something like this might be what you are looking for....

http://www.imation.com/products/disc_stakka/index. html

- 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.

Here's the real solution to your requirements...

[Optic7]

There was a story here on slashdot a few months ago about an alternative to jewel cases, where people discussed all kinds of options for CD/DVD storage. I found this particular comment to be the most useful for really large scale CD/DVD storage. It seems simple, effective, and practical. Also check the other comments on that story for other ideas, but I think this is really the best solution for you based on what you said:

Large quantity CD/DVD storage solution

White folder boxes

[jnaujok]

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.

FIFO is key

[0xABADC0DA]

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.

Re:Bookshelf or spools?

[The Great Pretender]

Coming from an environment that is required to retain client data for up to 7 years, it strikes me that a simple book-shelf is terrible. Surely the CD/DVD's should be in a fire/earthquake/flood proof container? I would have to ask what the liability of the original posters referenced firm is should they have disasterous loss. The original poster makes reference to a steel draw, suggesting that fire proofing is required. Assuming that the original CD's need to be retained the best method that I could think of would be to archive the images of the CD/DVD's on a harddrive for ease of use and then find a third party managed storage space off-site for bulk storage of the disks. Once a week, or month, do a store/purge cycle. The liability for the hard copies then falls under managment of the third parties facility and their iinsurance.