I’ve bought a lot of these recently from Argos:

Argos Unit

They look okay and you get enough space for up to 80 DVDs for £19.99, which is pretty decent I think.  If you live in a small place like me, they’re really good as you can put them into all sorts of odd corners too.  There’s also room on the top for odd shaped box sets etc.  Here’re four in a row:



The other thing I’ve done to ‘make’ more space is build a set of shelves that stick directly out from the wall near a corner, which effectively makes a little room (without a door) that you can use most of three sides of for storage:



Paul

That’s interesting.  The Ikea versions are cheaper or more expensive (depending on the colour) but look the same in the pictures.  (They have identical dimensions to the Argos ones.)  The only difference I can see is that the Ikea ones are 2.6kg lighter but magically hold 8 more DVDs!  (Must by slim case ones...)

What’s most exciting is that Ikea now do home delivery!  It didn’t for years and as I haven’t got a store anywhere near where I live I’d sort of got used to ignoring it.  My credit card thanks you...

For those favoring electronic storage, have you noticed that you can get 3TB USB external drives for $140 now? (Hitachi). That's a minimum of 500 DVDs at a liberal estimate of 6GB/per!!!! Or 100 BD at 30GB, although recently most I bought are larger than that.

That is getting down into the price per BD disc of my Sony CX960 which stores 400 BD, for which I paid $600.

But the 3TB drive now beats the former champ - CX995V: 400 DVDs for under $300.

I have a couple of these spinning towers:

They actually will fit 29 keep cases or 34 blu ray cases per shelf.  That one you see there is completely full.  My collection only includes 1200-1300 titles, so the other one is for TV series and box sets.  However, it is empty right now since I have movers coming in 2 weeks.  I packed up that one because I don't want them handling box sets they might damage.

I've done a full circle on trying to figure out the best storing furniture for my DVDs. Finally went back to using lundia shelving system. Though this time with a white finish:



Still need to buy a few more shelves though. I've used shelves from that manufacturer over 2/3 of my life, and it seems they've become what i compare everything else to.

I actually built my own shelves (not happy with shelving available, for the prices they are available, or future availability for expansion)

I built a series of shelves out of yellow pine 1 x 6 with a 1X10 base (for stability)  it is then sanded, sanded some more, then sanded even more.  Once I was satisfied with the sanding, I covered them with 2 coats of Mission oak gloss stain.  Gave it kind of a rustic oak look.  I nailed a harboard backing to finish them.

they are 9 shelves high (just over 81" tall) and approx 31.5" wide  This gave me about 50 standard DVD cases per shelf (loose fit)  450 per unit, and I have built 5 so far.

Charlie

I read more of this thread and saw a few others with similar Media Center systems.

A few pointers....

Do NOT use RAID for these sort of systems so to believe them safe from a drive failure.  RAID is about speed, and not backup.  A RAID that fails can easily mean losing your collection as it can cascade due to these files being larger than standard files such as documents, photos, etc. that is the standard fare.

I've discussed this in many forums before and many people going with a single RAID approach ended up regretting it when something did happen.  If you do go ahead with such an approach, then make sure that you get a duplicate system.

Speed wise, you are not going to gain anything as video playback does not require high speeds.

For example, on my system:

I'm using mostly green drives with e-sata boxes (2 boxes with 4 drives per box = 16TB) using an e-sata card with port multiplier.  This gives me each hard drive as an individual drive, so I can easily assign everything in any way I want. I have this setup in duplicate, so if I have one drive that goes, I simply would need to copy my second copy (backup) to a new drive and not have to rebuild anything like a RAID requires.

These boxes are a LOT cheaper also than a RAID approach (they can be found for around 100$ each) and with 2TB drives at under 80$.. for about 500$ you can have a 8TB box... but of course, I recommend getting a second set for backup.  But you can make your system grow as you need it (use only 2 drives for your main and the other two for backups for a 4TB system).

About the speed, I can easily be viewing a movie on my machine, while in the other room, my other computer is pulling another video via WIFI, and with no slowdown, skipping, etc. whatsoever.

I've checked the WIFI's bandwidth as it was playing, and it barely requires wireless "G" speeds (and I have "N").  During use, I get that a DVD resolution video pulls a maximum of 0.50% of my Gbps, so about 500bps (or 50Bps), well under even WIFI speeds.