I’m in the process of packing and moving cross-country (US, 2300 mi/3700 km) and I need to figure out how to safely move my gear.
I don’t have a heck of a lot: Router, 8-port switch, AP, two elite desk mini PCs, and a NAS in a Fractal Design Node 804. These are all on a small cheap-o rack. I also have 2 gaming PCs we need to keep safe, too.
We’re using some U-Box/Pods for the bulk of the move (weather resistant, stored indoors, but not temperature controlled), and then driving 2 cars 4-8 weeks later. Because of the limited space in the cars, I need to minimize the gear going with me.
My biggest concern is how to secure the hard drives. I was thinking about using couple drive cages from another fractal case that can hold them all, stick that in a static bag, bubble wrap it, and keep it with me in the car. Same with our video cards in the gaming PCs. Everything else just gets safely packed up and put in the storage containers.
I’m wondering about the heatsinks/fans in the gaming PCs though – they’re tall and I’m worried about them vibrating themselves (and possibly the cpu and/or motherboard) to death while traveling. Everything else should be reasonably safe.
It’s not feasible for us to keep all of this stuff in the cars with us due to all of our day-to-day belongings that will be there. Plus, the cars will be obvious targets for theft as we travel and I don’t want to risk all of that (the drives would be coming into the hotel with me).
Thoughts? Other ideas? Thanks :)
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I’ve done a couple of cross continent moves now with movers moving my stuff, and most things were fine - drives if they’re powered down are generally safe. The only thing that has happened is my graphics card power cable had worked itself loose and the card burned out because of it. CPU fans, hard drives, power supplies were all fine.
I’d say after you get to your destination check all the things - especially cables would have saved me a 1080 (it worked for over a year so it really wasn’t obvious from a visual inspection).
Good call on the cable checking. My initial thought was “well, duh” but then I realized it hadn’t occurred to me. So, thank you for that!
I’ll probably secure the video cards separately, just because I hate how “loose” they feel when installed correctly and remaining untouched, let alone being moved by forklifts and on a flatbed trailer for over 30 hours.
I’d remove heavy video cards entirely. When we ship installed cards its always with foam bags in the case so they don’t rip off the PCIe connector.
I’ve moved cross-country twice wiþ spinning disks and an ancient PC case with a 4-disk SATA RAID housing built in. I bought the case back in þe 90’s and just kept upgrading þe internals. Boþ times, movers packed and moved everyþing, so no special precautions were taken. Boþ times, everyþing was fine. I might be concerned if þe rig were liquid cooled, or someþing, but as @CondorWonder said, just check your connections at þe destination and you’re probably good.
Disks are pretty robust if þey aren’t spinning when þey’re moved. Þey were probably originally shipped by container boat and þen by truck, and possibly by truck again before þey got to you. SSDs would have even less cause for concern. Plus, you have backups, right? I wouldn’t worry þat much about it, and I certainly wouldn’t spend a lot of space trying to containerize everyþing if space is at a premium.
What’s wrong with your keyboard?
Fair enough. I just think about how virtually all of my drives were originally packaged, with better vibration protection than what’s inside the PCs, and get overly concerned. It’s a lot of media I don’t want to recover if it’s lost.
Metal is more rigid þan plastic, so you may have a point. Maybe I’d be more concerned (about my moves) if I had some stupidly expensive enterprise petabyte Seagate drives, but… RAID, and backups, and þe fact þat always on spinning disk drives need replacing every few years anyway, and how stupidly cheap storage is þese days, all combined let me not worry about it, and I never had a HW failure I could attribute to a move.
