What to do with a cd network tower?

March 16, 2004 9:16 AM

I've got a 14 cd network tower. I cannot figure out why I would use it instead of a big ol' hard drive. Anyone have any idea what I could use it for?

This is what I have- can I put hard drives in it? It says "up to 14 optical devices", which makes me think I'm stuck with CD/DVD.

posted by dogwelder to Technology (6 answers total)

I don't think hard drives will work in that. I think it assigns each device a different LUN on the same SCSI target. That won't work with most host controllers. Unless I'm mistaken, it isn't just a big honkin' case with a power supply, which actually could take whatever the hell you want in there.

In any case, you would use this instead of a big hard drive because any of:

1. In the olden days nine gigs of storage -- 14 CDs -- was an ungodly quantity. Using expensive hard drive space for cheap CD storage would have been insane, so this kind of rig sprung up before disks got cheap.

2. You want to be able to stream or rip 14 DVDs at the same time.

3. You rotate through a huge number of CDs or DVDs -- thousands -- for some purpose, but only need 14 at a time.
posted by majick at 9:34 AM on March 16, 2004

As stated above, this would be great for people who are trying to rip their entire huge CD collection.
posted by zsazsa at 10:54 AM on March 16, 2004

As stated above, this would be great for people who are trying to rip their entire huge CD collection.

Agreed. In fact, let me know if you end up wanting to get rid of it.
posted by Jairus at 11:16 AM on March 16, 2004

Response by poster: Sorry, jarius- I emailed the district ITD person and she's got a use for it - some program that spans ten discs. It just left the office.
posted by dogwelder at 1:48 PM on March 16, 2004

You wouldn't want to rip CD's from 1st or 2nd generation CD-ROM drives anyway, because they almost always end up sending data out analog or send the slightest scratch through to the encoder. I collected about 30 albums using my 2nd generation and had to start over again when I realized how poor the quality was compared to a 16x drive and LAME (I was using Musicmatch jukebox... ugh).
posted by Keyser Soze at 3:31 PM on March 16, 2004

Keyser Soze: I hope you were using EAC's secure mode the second time around, yes?
posted by Jairus at 3:47 PM on March 16, 2004