A few years ago I purchased a couple of huge storage racks that have since sustained some water damage. These two racks were $250 a pop and I’m not really looking to spend that much…so I’m looking into alternate means of storage. I know some people use storage books…how exactly do you organize a collection like that without going insane every time you’re looking for a particular title? What methods do some of you use? What other options are there besides storing in a book/traditional shelving display?

School me, Invelos’ers!

When I moved a year ago, I had to find a way to transport thousands of DVDs & Blu-rays in a way that I could still access them without having to search through (and unpack) moving boxes.  I ended up purchasing a few hundred file storage boxes from a supply store.  Each box held about 50 DVDs and 62 Blu-rays when lined up in two rows.

Once I made the move, I ended up leaving them in the boxes.  I can stack them up to ten high without problem (they're incredibly sturdy) and it was easy enough to create a filing system to locate within seconds.

Everything I have DVD wise are in Sony CX995s ( 4 of them ) but I keep all the Slip covers and bonus discs in the Case Logic binder.

I have my collection divided up into the following collections

Movies ( All live action )
Animated
TV Season

Cuts down on the clutter. BR's I only have about 150 or so and they are still in cases on a shelf. The only boxes i keep or specials ( Steelbooks ) and the Season DVD boxes ( Xfiles, Smallville, CSI etc ) So with 1500 ish titles it takes up 2 thin tall book shelves ( cheap )

I keep a note book with printed reports of locations ( for the players )

-R

Didnt do that right did I?

Quoting tcremote:

Quote:
OK, I have circa 3500 dvd/bd discs, mainly dvd. Any idea how much "Raid" storage I'd need and where I might find it?

Profiler tells me I have about 1100, and I use about 3Tb of disk space. Although I am in the process of recompressing my HD movies down to about 5-10Gb per movie, so that will save some space (I can't tell the difference in quality between the compressed and uncompressed..)

I put together 6 750Gb WD SATA drives and used Linux software RAID in a 5+1 configuration. I have had a couple drives die on me, but WD replaced them under warranty and all my data stayed intact.

You could, of course, use an external hardware RAID solution. You should be able to find everything at your favourite PC component website. You also need some software to be able to "backup" and recompress your discs.

I would personally do a RAID 6 which gives your 2 redundant drives. Better fault tolerance if 2 drives die.

-R

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

That will break down the basics

You take a crap load of small discs and spread larger amounts of data across them


|-----|------|------|------|------|-------|

Think of those segments as the HD's say 2 TB each. In RAID 5 you get 2TB * (Total HD's -1 )

So in the case with 6 drives you get 10TB of storage and that extra 2TB HD is used in case 1 HD fails

In RAID 6 you add another HD to the mix for additional protection, so 2tb * ( Total HD's -2 ) storage.

its rather simple in idea, a bit more to implement

-R

Quoting chibul:

Quote:
I know some people use storage books…how exactly do you organize a collection like that without going insane every time you’re looking for a particular title? What methods do some of you use?

Last year I moved almost all of my DVDs into storage books.  There wasn't another option for the space I have.  My collection needed 14 large books (hold 300+ discs).  My blu-rays are still on the shelf, as is all of my Criterion and a few box sets. 

I don't have any problems or go insane looking for titles.  I have everything in alphabetical order.  I left room at the end of each letter for new acquisitions and I left spots for everything on my wishlist.  There are 8 binders of live action movies, 3 binders of anime, 2 binders of documentaries, and 1 binder of animation.

It's been a real space saver and has actually enabled me to work on updating more profiles than ever before.