Nick Race27 February 2008, 11:27 PM
The Centurion DiscHub is made to take the effort out of it.
Storing large amounts of optical media is a chore. Whether it’s audio, data or video, physically managing a collection, looking through them, cataloguing discs and getting your hands on them quickly is a task that most don’t wish to deal with.
The unit holds 100 CDs or DVDs in a rotary carousel, then feeds the disc in to an optical drive when you need it. Therein lies the major strength and the major weakness of the Centurion DiscHub. Though it can catalogue your optical discs, there’s no method of integrating it in to the OS, so you’re back to looking up the database and pulling out the disc when you need it manually.
Though Centurion advertises the model as a replacement for tape as a backup medium, it’s not going to cut it unless the integration between the backup software and the MediaTracker software is created; otherwise, when a disc is full, you’re back to manually changing it (through the software at least). If you consider the original, it’s like going back to 8.5GB tapes and the autoloader doesn’t work. The key difference is the DiscHub’s contents are searchable through a database, and single file restoration is much, much easier.
As an offline storage solution, the DiscHub represents great value for money. At $799 for 850GB of storage (plus media costs, naturally) it beats tape hands down. But whether or not the manual interaction is something your business can cope with is an expense that can’t be calculated. Also, make sure the optical media you choose is of archival quality, as the lifespan of cheaper media can be questionable.