Optical media carousel for reading DVD-R and CD-R disks

Question

I have several hundreds of optical media disks (mainly DVD-R & CD-R) that stores data, that needs to be transferred to a hard disk drive to improve accessibility.

As a possible alternative to a bunch of external slot-in DVDs connected to a computer I'm looking for a CD-R/DVD-R reader carousel that could read data on the DVDs and store it on a OS X, Linux or Windows 7 (64-bit) computer, a portable disk drive or to a NAS.

To be just as good as Hardware for extracting data from eight DVD-Rs at the same time the reader should be capable of reading at 16x, and number of slots should be at least eight, prices should be below $300, as that would probably be the cost of hooking up eight DVD-Rs to one of my computers.

It seems that the Digistore Solutions CHUB-DSS Centurion DiscHUB could have been an alternative, but this seems to be unsupported and a quite expensive product at $680: http://www.digistoresolutions.com/products/centurion-dischub

Do I have any alternatives?

Answer 1

The answer is no. The thing is, that the more specialized you get, the more expensive hardware gets. To give you an example, you can buy a 4-inch dye sub printer for roughly $150, a 6-inch for $1350, an 8-inch for $5000. The less often a piece of machinery is used, the more expensive it gets. This is why an 8-disk hub is so much more expensive than hooking up 8 separate DVD-R's to a computer.

Therefore, if you are only looking for something that can do many DVD's at once, there is a possibility that eventually, something might come out that would do the job. However, if you also need it to be cheap, then this will not happen unless the market changes to where many people will all the sudden need 8-disc hubs, and they can be mass produced. Which I believe you can agree to, will not happen in this day and age.