JDizzy's Journal: digital archiving

So I've been getting more dvd's recently and I'm starting to have a fairly respectible sci-fi collection. I've had a "wanted" list for some time now, and it keeps getting shorter, but now i'm almost to the point of having to get certain titles that I find to be boring (solaris) just for the sake of completeness. Having a complete archive is important to me, but I'm starting to wonder at what point I need to restrain myself. Another issue I have to start thinking about is the dvd end-of-life span; when the market introduces a replacement for dvd with something better. I know guys with awsome VHS collections, and I pity them.

So to that end i've begun to construct my media storage center. I've calculated that I will need about 2,850 gigabytes (2.9Tb) to accomidate my current collection of about 300'ish titles. That is a fairly liberal calculation based on 300 dvd's at 9.5Gb each which i can assure isn't the case. Most dvd's are single sided, and don't even fillup the 4.75Gb allocation. So i'm looking at a bit of space to grow, but the problem is that right now I got this many dvd, but how many will I have a year from now? Probably 400 or more! So I'm still stuck on the storage system. I want to have at least 3Tb when I build-out the hardware, and have the ability to scale up later when I get more dvd's.