240, 400, 800, 1000 CD Cases. your chance to compare and Contrast

[baius]

Sorry for the huge time lapse between answering.

Always wanted to write a little something on this thread, but kept forgetting or putting it off.

Little recap:

• Part 1: 240-disk cases
• Part 2: 1000-disk, Scan

Part 3: AMPS cases, SVP.

Following advice on this thread I bought 4 AMPS 1000-Disk cases from SVP. At the time (see later), I was glad I did.

A good solution: there are 125 folders in the AMPS case, which are double-sided and 2x2. So the cases were about 2 CDs wide and 2 CDs high. This has the effect of making the cases a lot more transportable than the previous cases from Scan. Fully loaded, they were still heavy, but it was cube-shaped rather than long-coffin shaped... Hope that makes sense.

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Maybe the following will help. If, for the same depth, you have two rows of two rather than one row of 4, you can "get your hands round" what you're carrying a lot easier.

These cases were great, but as we've now got to the stage where terabyte-class hard drives exist among us for reasonable prices, I (continued)...

[azrael316]

That 1000 case is sweeeeet.

My personal preference atm is the floor..

[baius]

... I chose to use just one of the cases for orignals of DVDs, CDs and other "disks" (IE software disks, etal) but use hard drives.

I bought an Icy Dock 3 5.25" to 4 3.5" bay converter, so I can move HDDs out easily. Then, over time, I bought several large HDDs and made backups of my disks.

I'm not particularly trusting of HDD technology for the long-term, so once a disk is full, I've cloned it to another seperate disk for backup. That is then kept off site. I've used a set of two 1 TB drives and a set of two 1.5 TB drives so far, and ideally need to buy more. (Money issue, again...)

Apart from the time-limitations mentioned for Hard Drives, there are several major advantages to the approach I've adopted. Using the AMPS cases (or the ones I used before them) was OK, but finding a particular CD/DVD was very time-consuming. Having things on HDD allows for far quicker retrieval. The physical space taken up is considerably less. 4 HDDs (inc 2 backups) is much less than 4 huge cases. It astounds me that both hold the same number of 1's and 0's!

I don't keep the hard drives in the PC when they're not used, but hot-swap as and when I want things. The theory is that the drives will last longer if they're not constantly spinning up and down to Windows demands, daily virus scans and the like.

The Icy Dock should have made hot-swapping easy, but it hasn't - yet. I believe that my motherboard (Asus P5b-VM) may be a little old-in-the-tooth, now, and not support hot-swap properly. The result is that I currently have to turn off my PC, and then put a hard drive in or take it out. I'm looking to replace my Core 2 Duo with an i5 system, soon, and hope I can achieve hot-swap with the Icy Dock or an eSata solution I've got (also from Icy Dock).


So there you have it. I feel I'm there, storage wise. Some optical media, a handful of HDDs.

The nature of the beast is that I'll have to keep adding hard drives over time, but it's a lot more manageable than adding 100's - 1000 DVDs. Hopefully as/when capacities of hard drives increase further, I can streamline older HDD's. (So if a 10 TB drive comes out, I could put the 1 TB's and 1.5 TB's contents onto it, and have 7.5-odd TB left for new data.)

Thank you for reading my story. As I asked over two years ago: what's your story/solution?

If you haven't posted here yet, but have an ingenious method for keeping your data in order, let us know about it. Or link to another thread perhaps (or link this one to that). Thanks.

[baius]

That 1000 case is sweeeeet.

My personal preference atm is the floor..

Thanks for joining the thread. I wondered if there'd be any responders due to the thread's age...

I take it you're referring to the AMPS case - it is, as you say, excellent.

The floor is certainly one storage option, and very convenient; but I'm keen to keep the data available for use for as long a period of time as possible, and am not sure "the floor" would be my preferred method long-term. Hehe.

EDIT: Found this:
http://www.svp.co.uk/technology/amps...000-discs.html
Might help someone.

[azrael316]

Thanks for joining the thread. I wondered if there'd be any responders due to the thread's age...

I take it you're referring to the AMPS case - it is, as you say, excellent.

The floor is certainly one storage option, and very convenient; but I'm keen to keep the data available for use for as long a period of time as possible, and am not sure "the floor" would be my preferred method long-term. Hehe.

Yeah the AMPS case. lol.

And "The Floor" is only my current solution, I have in the past also used "The Top of my PC", "Under the Bookcase" and my personal fave "Cardboard BOx along with sharp pointy objects". For some reason though moast of them seem to stop working afdter my storage techniquies.

Serously though, Some really good ideas on storage and back-up in this thread.

[baius]

Serously though, Some really good ideas on storage and back-up in this thread.

Thank you. I'm delighted it's given someone - anyone - some food for thought. I need to sleep (have work in the morning), but look forward to seeing you round the forums.

[jim]

My dvds stay in their original cases. For computer discs, unless it's original discs for things like Windows, Flight Sim, games, or other software I've purchased, my cd/dvd media tends to sit on the spindles I bought them on. I also find that having them liberally strewn across my computer desk makes them much more accessible. And good for keeping the dust off the desk.

(EDIT) That "lol" smiley is a little OTT. I wasn't trying to suggest that what I wrote is in any way going to cause a laughing fit.

I discovered a while ago that you need the one that says :laugh as opposed to :lol

It's not advertised on the advanced post page though... same goes for :naughty