slaingod

So I really want an automated CD/DVD changer for my DVD burner on my PC. Ideally something that would work with pretty much any drive you threw in it. Simply a mechanism for taking a disc from one stack of blanks, dropping it into the DVD tray, and pulling it out when the dvd was finshed buring or being read. Ideally this could be used for:

• Burning a bunch of downloaded files
  
• Backing up a harddrive/mp3 collection that spanned many DVD
• Ripping an entire CD/DVD collection to harddrive.

Something that could be upgraded with a new ‘Blu-Ray’, X-Ray or whatever type of disc in the future with the same physical specifications.

These things do exist, but are usually outrageously expensive for a little mechanical arm that pops a disk out.  Hell, I can buy a Roomba robot for $200, but the cheapest burner changer costs $500. It’s just a motorized arm for crying out loud.  IN the absence of something affordable, it would be great if there was a homebrew DIY project out there that was fairly easy to put together as weekend project that could do the same. The few examples out there, but they aren’t really practical, just pretty amazing from an ingenuity perspective.

Here are some of the existing way-to-expensive-for-casual-use models out there:

Forte (cheapest duplicator out there)

ReflexAuto (This is the basic design style of many of these, and the sort of thing I would want to see but in a smaller form factor. )

Sony (I KNOW!) had probably the only consumer device on the market but did nothing to promote it, the Sony VGP-XL1B.  A bunch of lucky souls got these at clearance prices before the 2007 holiday season for $99 (originally $399). They are now going for $400 on eBay. It isn;t the ideal solution tho, as dealing with a carousel when you need to label the burned media isn’t terribly easy.

The truth of the matter is that there is probably a limited timeframe where these things would be useful for the burning functionality, as hard drives get cheaper and larger. When 1TB heard drives are $100 in the near future, it basically reaches the break-even with physical media blanks.  It currently costs about $0.50  to $0.60 for each DVD you burn, to buy the media ($0.35 for Ritek in 100+ lots), plus $0.15  per sleeve to put them into a binder book (unless you just keep them stacked in the spindle), plus another $0.05 per disk for the cost of the burner. Companies are even realizing this, one company selling harddrives with 10 HiDef movies on them, you just pick the 10 movies you want. Obviously hard drives become a single point of a much larger catastrophic failure, but as long as a drive ilasts another 2 years, we should see 2TB drives for $100 by then so backups become trivial.

If I was in the DVD/Blu-Ray media business I would be crapping my pants right now.