There they are staring at you: Piles of CDs and DVDs strewn about the room daring you to organize them.

You could put them all in CD albums and set up a simple database in Microsoft Access, as I eventually did. But that's time consuming and requires a commitment (akin to marriage) to maintain.

You could hire someone else to do it all for you, which is easier on the commitment side but could become expensive.

Or you could use the new Disc Stakka CD and DVD Manager ($149) from Imation, which not only holds 100 of those discs, but maintains a database for you and can retrieve them at the click of a mouse.

The concept is not new. Korea Data Systems introduced similar technology more than three years ago when it went to market with its PC Controlled CD Organizer, which was a lot bigger and only held 75 discs.

This new disc storage system is about half the size of its predecessor, holds more and doesn't suffer from the connectivity problems the CD Organizer had. And, if you have a ton of discs, the unit is designed to "communicate" with up to four more Disc Stakkas, giving you access to 500 discs without having to connect them to your computer or install more software. You can also connect more than 100 five-unit towers to your computer using USB hubs, giving you access to more than 50,000 discs.

Other features include:

• Its OptiTracker database can either retrieve information from each disc or you can enter the information yourself. The caveat here is that, if you want to log information directly from the disc, you have to insert it into the CD or DVD drive on your computer and then move it to the Disc Stakka after the information has been retrieved by the software.
• To "find" a disc, simply right click on it in the database and the unit with retrieve it for you. It also remembers what discs have been ejected and where they were stored.
• One USB connection will supply connectivity and power to up to five Disc Stakkas.
• The database can be searched by title, keyword and filename.
• Gamers will never have to search through piles of discs to find "disc 1" so they can play games stored on their computers.
• It's USB 1.1 and 2.0 compatible.

For more information check out www.imation.com/stakka.

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