Imation ANZ Disk Stakka

The Disc Stakka is an optical disc storage device that is hooked up to your PC to manage all those discs that tend to lie around the desk looking unsightly. It is very easy to set up and fits 100 discs per unit with the ability to stack up to five units on top of each other, for a whopping 500 disc capacity.

When we initially saw this product on television we got very excited about its potential. As soon as we got it in, we were eager to set it up and pack it full of discs, but upon doing so were bitterly disappointed.

As the discs are inserted they are tracked with provided software called Opditracker which asks you to label the discs and assign them to a category. The variety of categories is large enough that it would be unlikely that very many discs wouldn't fit into at least one of them.

Unfortunately, that is the extent of the Disk Stakka's usefulness, essentially making it a very expensive version of a disc spindle. There is no optical drive within the Disc Stakka, so you can't actually read the discs once they are in the unit.

The box for this unit raves about the search capabilities of the Opditracker software and they are indeed very impressive. However, in order to use them you first have to log the contents of every single disc you put into the Stakka, which is ridiculously time consuming. To log the contents of a disc, it first has to be inserted into the Stakka and labelled. Then the user tells the program to log the disc contents, at which time it ejects the disc and asks for it to be put it in the attached computer's optical drive. The software then logs the contents of the disc, ejects it from the computer and asks for the disc to be inserted back into the Stakka. That's one down, only 499 to go.

If this unit had an optical drive in it, it would be the ultimate disc storage device. Without it, it's fairly pointless.