Best method to transport a PC plus a stack of HDD's coast to coast and keep them intact

IceBurner

I need to transport both a PC, and a collection of HDDs (actual spinning rust) from one North American coast to the other, and very soon; a matter of weeks away. I'm terrified of entrusting them to someone else at all, but this has to get done; I have to choose how to go about each. Can anyone who's successfully done either of these before speak from experience to suggest how?

The PC needs to arrive next-day. I kept all retail packaging/padding except for the SSDs, which I'll simply carry on my person anyway. So far I've thought of the following possibilities:
- Fully disassemble the PC and ship its parts, other than drives, overnight.
- Ship only the case with PSU, and take the non-drive parts in carefully-prepared checked hardcase luggage.

For the ~10 HDDs, I have only a few of the original retail/shipping boxes and plastic inserts. Best I have for the rest is anti static bags padded with small bubble cushions. Better than nothing, but I'd really like to get more proper HDD mailers if anyone could point to where. These drives contain data I need to remain intact. Methods I've considered so far:
- Pack them into small boxes (HDD mailers if at all possible), then ship those in a larger box padded with airpack or large bubble wrap so they can't shift around. Mark the box fragile, this side up, and wish really, really hard.
- Attempt to fly with them in my carry on.

Most of them are terrabyte size, so I can't reasonably buy enough SSD's to clone or image them on short notice. The oldest ones are for retro machines that require the physical HDDs.

Thank you for any guidance.

Delzhand

For the HDDs, maybe your local hardware store (or possibly craft store?) will have polyethylene blocks/sheets? It's what they make gun case inserts out of apparently, seems reasonable if they're in static bags that you can cut some slots out with a box knife and wedge them in there to keep them from getting jostled without adding a ton of weight.

Aioua

Hard drives are pretty shock resistant, assuming they're off when it happens.

Anyway i worked at a UPS store *mumble* years ago and my general advice for fragile packing:

Bubble wrap is good if it's the big 1" bubbles, not the little bubbles. Bubbles in, smooth side out, tape it tightly with 2-3 of layers of bubble wrap. You want the item to be suspended in the middle so you can't actually touch any part of the item through the bubble wrap. If the wrap can shift or slide over the item it's too loose and won't do anything.

Double box where you can. One box holds your item and that box gets its own box with padding. Retail packaging with padding is usually ok for this. E.g, computer case in original pkg with padding, that box goes into another box with packing peanuts or bubble wrap. You want usually 2-3" of padding in- between the boxes. You can do things like bundle a bunch of smaller boxes together with bubble wrap and then put them all into one big box, that's generally fine.

The golden rule: if you're not willing to push your box off a counter and let it hit the floor then you haven't packed it good enough.

Disassbling the PC is the right call. You could probably leave the bare mobo bolted in there along with the psu, then pack memory/cpu/graphics/coolers separately. Most all of those components are pretty tough individually, it's the connection points where it's weak if they're suddenly being stressed.

For the hard drives, if the data is irreplaceable then i would put them in a carry on. Mostly a pain because it'll be heavy to carry.

Xaquin

edit: learn to read Xaquin!

Inquisitor77

I would strongly recommend taking the hard drives yourself and putting them in your carry-on, especially if they are old-school platter drives.

One issue I can see is that you probably don't want them going through the metal detector. I'm not sure about the new body scanners they have, but the old metal detectors and the personal wand they wave around your body can damage the drives.

If it was me, I'd be tempted to just flag with TSA directly that I have hard drives I don't want anything magnetic near in order to guarantee that they won't get put through the metal detector. But when you ask for something like that, they typically pull you out of line and...make you go through the metal detector. Then they wand you. Neither of those things is a problem as long as your bag is going through the x-ray machine without you, but there's also a chance that they will take your bag and wand it, too. To be perfectly frank, TSA is incompetent as all hell and I have very little faith that telling them that you have old hard drives that can't get magnets near them will help. Rather, there's even odds that doing so would directly cause them to magnet the fuck out of your stuff.

A happy path scenario will be you put the drives in your carry-on, it goes through the x-ray machine, no one cares, and you pick it up on the other side. A worst-case scenario is that they flag your carry-on for some reason and then take it through a metal detector or wand it.

In terms of packing materials, you might want to just bite the bullet and go to FedEx/UPS/Office Depot and buy a bunch of cheap stuff to properly insulate them. If you get enough proper padding you can feel relatively comfortable putting them in checked luggage. I'd also be wary of doing something like hardcore taping bubble wrap around the drives, because if TSA pulls you out to look at your bag, there's a decent chance they will want to handle the drives directly, which means they will cut through any packing you have to get to them. You can still wrap them without tape and/or double-pack them in smaller boxes instead.

I once took a few glass growlers of sour beer in my carry-on by putting them in shoeboxes lined with paper towels, and then putting the boxes in my luggage. It wasn't pretty, but it got the job done.

Skeith

I've shipped a computer with a PSU in it. It's a bad idea and I had the wrecked CPU to prove it. Dismount it and stick it in a box with whatever padding you've got (socks work wonderfully). The mobo and cpu in the case will be fine but I wouldn't leave anything else in there. Your best option for the HDDs really is as a carry on, just tell them you'd like it inspected manually like camera film.

Gilgaron

I've not used it for PC parts so I think antistatic would be important, but polystyrene foam board insulation from the hardware store makes good custom foam box padding.

IceBurner

Thank you for the suggestions thus far.

I now have one more option for the HDDs, though it's much slower: I can pack my drives into a box to be included in a private shipping container. It seems relatively safe, as it will be moved only by forklift and its own truck (not electromagnet, I called to confirm), and remain upright at all times. The downside is a 2.5 week transit time, but speed isn't important for the backup and retro drives, only survival.

Still unsure what's best for the PC, other than taking its drives on my person as planned. I suppose I could express the parts, but the Corsair 200R case is nearly half a grand to overnight, going by all shipping estimates.

Inquisitor77

The cost of checking in a bag is likely the same, if not cheaper, than shipping all the components separately.

Everything else in the PC can be taken apart and shipped safely in a check-in bag as long as it is suitably packed. Keep in mind this stuff is handled far worse when getting from the factory to the store. Just put enough padding around the boxes and case that things are protected from the outside and aren't shifting around. Even just filling your luggage with those cheap air bags should be sufficient for those purposes.

Skeith

IceBurner wrote: »

Thank you for the suggestions thus far.

I now have one more option for the HDDs, though it's much slower: I can pack my drives into a box to be included in a private shipping container. It seems relatively safe, as it will be moved only by forklift and its own truck (not electromagnet, I called to confirm), and remain upright at all times. The downside is a 2.5 week transit time, but speed isn't important for the backup and retro drives, only survival.

Still unsure what's best for the PC, other than taking its drives on my person as planned. I suppose I could express the parts, but the Corsair 200R case is nearly half a grand to overnight, going by all shipping estimates.

Hard case and packaging plus padding will be the most cost effective, but yeah... the case is going to be brutal.

e- Honestly, if you're purely considering cost, buying a new case and having it delivered at the other end is cheapest. It probably won't have an optical bay like that old Corsair does though.

IceBurner

The backup/retro drives will take the slow route, by private freight container. I can control more of how they're packed and handled than the other methods since it will be sealed and only moved by forklift onto a dedicated truck, not by hand.

My current drives are going as they always were, on me.

I'll attempt to check all other PC parts if not the chassis itself, too. A monstrous hardcase should serve. The cost to ship the empty chassis is so ridiculous that if it doesn't fit with the components I'll order a new one, since it's less than half the cost.

Everyone, thanks for your help.