From this…
…to this.
DVD/Blu-Ray (let’s just call them “DVDs” to make it easy on me) storage can be a massive pain in the butt. The amount of space that those plastic cases (DVDs in particular) consume compared to the thickness of the actual discs is crazy. I like the look of a wall of DVDs, but who has that kind of storage space? And the dust?..c’mon!
Luckily for me, about a year before our fire, I had removed about 90% of my DVD collection from their cases and put them into two large (300+ capacity) binders. I absolutely HATED those binders. You couldn’t get them to zip shut and they were bulky & heavy. Even being more or less alphabetically organized, it was a hassle to dig out a specific disc.
The “luckily” part about it for me was that both binders survived our fire because they were on the floor under a shelf. The binders themselves got wet & nasty, but the discs mostly escaped unscathed. After a cleaning in soap and water to remove the thin layer of soot, I ended up with something like 450 loose discs. As a “temporary” storage solution, I put them in the paper sleeves you can see in the first photo above and stored them in a couple of shoe boxes. Terrible system.
I just couldn’t make myself take the time to label the sleeves. I alphabetized them at first but that lasted about 2 days. Finding a specific disc could take 15 to 20 minutes. I started buying replacement plastic cases but ran into the storage issue pretty quick, plus I still didn’t want to take the time to label the boxes.
One day, after digging through piles of discs to find a specific movie for my kids to watch, I said “I’m done with this.” I searched Amazon.com and came across the Atlantic CD Case/Disc Manager 80 Disc Drum. It was priced at a low $21.98 and carried a 4.5/5.0 star rating with 49 reviews.
I have a love/hate relationship with Amazon reviews. In my experience, for every glowing review, you’ll find an equally convincing argument for why “Item X” is a total piece of crap. But most of the reviews for this storage drum were great and the few lower rated ones were pretty ticky-tack. I went ahead and ordered one and am happy to report that it works great.
All you do is load up your discs into the drum in the notches numbered “1” through “80.” That part takes about 5 minutes. You do have to make a list of your discs corresponding to its respective slot. That might seem like a handle, but it only took me about 30 minutes on my laptop. Atlantic provides a link that allows you to go online and print out a list using their template which will then fit into the little drawer that slides out from the bottom of the unit. I haven’t done that yet since I intend to get two or three more of these to organize the cream of my DVD crop.
Once your discs are loaded (again, really easy), all you have to do is slide the little selector gizmo on the front to the disc number of choice. Depress the lever, lift the drum’s lid, and your disc is held out for retrieval. Couldn’t be easier. When you’re done, simply drop the disc back into its assigned slot and close the lid.
This system does require you to be diligent in returning discs to the correct slot when your done viewing them, but if you can resist the urge to leave DVDs laying all over the place, you’ll save yourself time, and a ton of storage space.
So, if you’re struggling with the same problem I had, de-clutter your nerd cave with the Atlantic Disc Storage Drum.
Copyright 2013 It Came From The Nerd Cave