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Author Topic: Nimbie  (Read 2121 times)

WeeHappyPixie

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Nimbie
« on: February 15, 2012, 09:38:38 am »

Does anyone know if Nimbie is supported by MC. I did a quick search but got no results.

Would really like to re-rip my entire collection but the thought of doing it manually is putting me off.

Cheers,

John
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rick.ca

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Re: Nimbie
« Reply #1 on: February 15, 2012, 04:41:40 pm »

I was going to suggest a ripping service could do about 500 CD's for the price of a Nimbie, but I see you've mentioned having 4,000 CD's. You really need this, don't you? ;)
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glynor

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Re: Nimbie
« Reply #2 on: February 15, 2012, 06:46:22 pm »

While I doubt MC has native support built in, I'm sure it would work very well with the QQGetTray utility they offer.  According to the site, this add-on is designed to make the Nimbie work with third-party utilities that don't have native support built in.  It sounds perfect.  Basically, it emulates the normal Windows "Tray Open" and "Tray Closed" behavior that applications expect.  You just set the application to auto-process when a disc is inserted (trivial in MC), auto-eject the disc when processing is complete (this is the default in MC), and select the Nimbie as the active drive (MC supports USB disc drives just fine).

I've used MC to burn to my Primera Bravo II duplicator plenty of times, and it works fine.

The Nimbie looks pretty cool.  If I still had large libraries of optical discs, I'd probably be in the market for one.  Hard drives just got so cheap so fast (and I had a LOT of trouble with maintaining archives of writable optical discs due to on-the-shelf degradation) that I abandoned my old archives and now I use external hard drives for backup and archival.

ProTip:  DO NOT trust burned optical discs stored on a shelf.  Whether you store them in a CD-book (even a "good" one), in jewel cases in conditions controlled like a normal office environment...  My old optical archives saw a roughly 10% failure rate after 3-5 years of "we tried to do it right" storage methods (out of the sun, stored safely, climate controlled 24/7, verified before storage, etc).  DVD-Rs cannot be trusted on a shelf.
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glynor

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Re: Nimbie
« Reply #3 on: February 15, 2012, 07:02:07 pm »

This made me think...

Man, I'd really be in the market for a "hard-drive Nimbie".  I'm picturing a device much like the Thermaltake BlacX drive dock line, where you could use a piece of software to have essentially "infinite storage archival space" (assuming you feed it enough drives).  I'm thinking something that works like this:

1.  The device is like a BlacX dock, where you have one or more SATA ports on the top, where you can plug in 2.5-3.5" SATA drives.
2.  I use their software to create a queue of files that you want to archive off to external on-the-shelf storage (hopefully via drag and drop and a Windows Explorer/Finder shell extension where you right-click and choose "Nimbify" or something).
3.  When I'm done building my queue, I hit a "Go" button to start the queue.
4.  It calculates the total amount of storage that the operation will require, and suggests the proper number and configuration of disks for you to have available.  It would also be nice if it could also use disks of a variety of sizes.  So, if you need 6400GB to complete the queue, you could either use 7 1TB drives, or assemble a collection variously-sized  blank drives that add up to at least 6400GB, and tell it what you have.
5.  It also calculates the optimal storage configuration of the files, so that drives don't have a bunch of wasted space at the "end".
6.  Then, it prompts you to insert the first disk(s), and it starts moving, verifying, and cataloging the queue.
7.  It saves, to each drive in the archive, some sort of database you can use (maybe just an excel spreadsheet, or maybe a sql database or something) to find these files later when you need them, and restore them back to their original configuration "online".

That would be a sweet piece of kit.  I'd buy one in an instant.
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