Archive for May 4th, 2007

Large DVD collections – storage pains

Friday, May 4th, 2007

My DVD collection is currently about 400 DVDs strong (628 actual discs). The biggest problem, apart from choosing what to watch, is organising and storing these DVDs.

I like to organise them alphabetically, which means shuffling everything around whenever I buy some new DVDs. But the biggest problem is storage, or rather, finding places to store them.

My DVD Collection

As you can see from the picture above, I’ve had to maximize all the storage spaces, stacking the DVDs in different ways whenever possible. I can probably still store about 200 DVDs in this way, but after that, who knows what I’ll do.

This is the biggest problem with having a physical medium. If everything was digital, then it would take roughly 5024 GB (each disc being 8 GB, which is quite a high estimate), or ten 500 GB hard-drives (until 1 TB drives are more available). To be safe, I should have a RAID-5 setup to ensure I don’t lose data, so I would an extra disk. These hard-drives would still occupy less space than a stack of 20 DVDs, and assuming I’ve done the hard work to categorize and tag these digital entries, searching and playback become so much easier and quicker.

Maybe one day…