Any way to add optical drives to a network as NAS?

[demongo]

Apologies if this has been covered, but I couldn't find an appropriate existing thread.

I would like to add optical drive read/write capabililty to my home network to augment the NAS devices I already have. But I haven't seen any ethernet-capable DVD or CD drives on the market.

I would like to avoid (if possible) building a separate box with OS etc. just to enable the optical drives, but I'm open to suggestions.

I've (naively) tried using the USB connections on my existing NAS devices to add external USB optical drives, but was not too surprised that this didn't work...

Any thoughts or input on this subject would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Ijack]

They do make such things. Here's one that I found. But I don't expect that it's cheap. With the cost of optical drives nowadays, why bother? Do you really have PCs that don't have an optical drive?

 

[Nik_I]

the optical drive is quickly becoming a thing of the past. what do you really need a network optical drive? if you're short of space, invest in more networked hard drives.

 

[demongo]

Thanks for the link.

That is indeed the sort of device/appliance I was looking for, albeit it seems to be overkill for me from a capability standpoint (and likely out of the sort of price range I was hoping for).

Here's a clarification of what I'm looking to do:

I have a home wireless network with multiple PCs, in use by various members of the household; currently I'm using a couple of NAS devices to provide continuous availability of data in RAID 1 configuration.

My objective is to remove as much of the individual machine specific dependencies from this network as possible; that is, since we end up switching which machines we happen to be using from time to time, I want to have as much capability residing *on the network itself* as possible, so I don't have to for instance go around and make sure a specific machine is on in order to get at information on that machine.

This requirement includes the ability to access CD/DVD drives; at this time, I'm constrained in having access to the CD/DVD drives on other machines only when those machines are up and running. What I would like is to be able to put drives on the network, and be able to access them when I want with whatever machine I happen to be on at the time.

Oh, and I was hoping to be able to spend less than $1000...;-)

 

[SomeJoe7777]

Well, it's not the CD drives that you need access to. It's the CDs that you need access to.

Rip the CDs to .iso files, store them on the file server, and mount them using Virtual Clone Drive from SlySoft.

This is the easiest and cheapest way to do this.

 

[demongo]

Thanks for the SlySoft suggestion.

It doesn't look like I can use this to write to the physical media over the network, though.

I feel I may be coming to the point where, to get precisely what I want relatively cheaply, I may have to put together a small linux box o' CD/DVD drives that functions as a little storage appliance.