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Perhaps this concept is a little dated- but perhaps it may need to be resurrected. I'm searching for a network attached device that does for CD/DVD/Blu Ray/etc disks what modern NAS does. Basically, it should have a drive or two, and an Ethernet connection, and make any inserted disk appear as a network share. I don't particularly have a need for block level IO or writing- simple sharing of files stored on a CD would fit my needs- but the other features might be nice.
Closest I'm finding is in the $2-3K range, and for that, you generally get between 4 and 8 drives, plus a hard drive to cache CD images- nice, but kind of overkill. Sharing of the files would be nice, but locking to a single user would work OK.
From a home user perspective, the idea would be to be able to mount up archives- old disks of pictures, or CD based backups, without the need to have a locally attached CD-rom. For my purpose (business), we've switched to thin clients- which really don't support USB CD-ROMs all that well. In an ideal world, this shouldn't cost more than $500 for a single or dual disk solution- it's really some sort of SBC tied to an IDE drive, and some (working) open source NAS software that knows how to handle mounting and unmounting.
Has anyone seen such a beast? Recommend something obvious that I'm overlooking? I'm open- it's not a super immediate need, and I'm willing to play a little to get there.
Closest I'm finding is in the $2-3K range, and for that, you generally get between 4 and 8 drives, plus a hard drive to cache CD images- nice, but kind of overkill. Sharing of the files would be nice, but locking to a single user would work OK.
From a home user perspective, the idea would be to be able to mount up archives- old disks of pictures, or CD based backups, without the need to have a locally attached CD-rom. For my purpose (business), we've switched to thin clients- which really don't support USB CD-ROMs all that well. In an ideal world, this shouldn't cost more than $500 for a single or dual disk solution- it's really some sort of SBC tied to an IDE drive, and some (working) open source NAS software that knows how to handle mounting and unmounting.
Has anyone seen such a beast? Recommend something obvious that I'm overlooking? I'm open- it's not a super immediate need, and I'm willing to play a little to get there.
