How do you organize donors?

[datahaze]

I'm curious how you all are organizing your inventory of drives. I currently am using some shelving that fits 3.5" form factor decently, with each HDD slot having a horizontal and vertical number. So for example, a HDD would be located in AZ3-4 which means "Shelving box A, column Z, row 3, drive 4 (if there are multiple drives in a single slot)". I then keep a spreadsheet of all the drive PCB numbers etc. They are roughly organized by manufacturer but not perfectly as things move around sometimes.

What's your system like? What are some of the pros/cons? Anybody using any "off the shelf" organization racks for this purpose? How do you decide which drives to keep in stock?

 

[pclab]

I still haven't had the time to redo my stock, but I'm willing to go using the https://hddstockroom.com/catalog/ system.
For now, my drives are in boxes numbered and I know that a specific drive is in box X.
Gonna start using rows and columns to organize.

What drives I keep in stock?? Well, everything I can get my hands on and that they are good enough to use as donors. :mrgreen:

 

[LarrySabo]

[post]11732[/post] What drives I keep in stock?? Well, everything I can get my hands on and that they are good enough to use as donors. :mrgreen:

Same here. For organization, I built a Open Office database app to key in donors, with an auto-incrementing inventory ID field and fields for typical match parameters. Drives are stored in storage bins, organized by Brand then ID. Works for me.

 

[lcoughey]

I like the look of that Larry. Very nice. I wonder how good that would work with several thousand drives.

I, too, am playing with HDDStockRoom.com and think it has huge potential if they can use the scanning app to allow us to relocate a drive without having to open up the web interface.

 

[LarrySabo]

[post]11735[/post] I like the look of that Larry. Very nice. I wonder how good that would work with several thousand drives.

Thanks Luke. I should be so lucky as to have that problem. LOL I have just a few hundred but could always buy more racks or shelving and separate bins if I needed more storage capacity. That's what I did to hold the 3.5" drives and they work fine.

 

[datahaze]

Wow Larry that's a beautiful system you have there! How have you liked OO Base? I've looked into it a number of times and I can't find much contemporary stuff written about it. Last I read it was kind of unstable and clunky, I take it that hasn't been your experience?

 

[Jared]

I'd love to get mine more organized, but never seem to find the time. I've just got stacks of bins and their only sorted by brand and form factor:

E.G. WD 3.5" drives are in bins WD1, WD2, WD3....WD60, Seagate 2.5 drives are in STL1 - STL40 etc.

But, it's all nicely organized in an excel sheet by series of drive. So I just search there, pick the drive I want to pull, then go find it in the numbered bin.

Eventually I'd like to sort it by families in the bins, but it's just too much work.

 

[LarrySabo]

[post]11739[/post] Wow Larry that's a beautiful system you have there! How have you liked OO Base?

Thanks, @datahaze. OO Base is not as stable as Access but it's fine. (I just realized that I designed the db using Access but access it using the OO Base app.) The db design and form I created suck, but they're adequate. In retrospect, it would have been good to have different forms for each drive brand rather than a generic catch-all, since not all fields are relevant for all brands.

The problem with organizing drives by family is,when I get multiple donors in unknown condition, I don't want to have to look up the family before I can file them. I do it later and enter it into the family field, so it's there eventually. Jared's database is so helpful for that. Thanks again Jared!

 

[datahaze]

[post]11739[/post] Wow Larry that's a beautiful system you have there! How have you liked OO Base?

Thanks, @datahaze. OO Base is not as stable as Access but it's fine. (I just realized that I designed the db using Access but access it using the OO Base app.) The db design and form I created suck, but they're adequate. In retrospect, it would have been good to have different forms for each drive brand rather than a generic catch-all, since not all fields are relevant for all brands.

The problem with organizing drives by family is,when I get multiple donors in unknown condition, I don't want to have to look up the family before I can file them. I do it later and enter it into the family field, so it's there eventually. Jared's database is so helpful for that. Thanks again Jared!

What are the stability issues you've encountered? I ask as there's a number of situations where I thought it would be a perfect fit for some project but I ended up doing something custom with Drupal as I didn't want to spend the time learning OO if I was going to end up having to switch to something else anyways. Drupal is powerful but it's less direct than what I want and the performance can be a nightmare, basically I'm always looking for something in-between an SQL database and drupal, some kind of "front-end" if you will and OO base seems to fill that niche.

 

[LarrySabo]

[post]11745[/post] What are the stability issues you've encountered?

I don't recall, to be honest. It was quite a while ago. Sometimes when I click my desktop shortcut to open the donor database in OO Base, it has lost the link to the program (or database) or needs to recover/restore the database. I can't be sure it isn't a problem with my system rather than OO Base. Other weird things happen like Everything (file indexer) not indexing files I know are there, makes me thing it's my system rather than OO Base.