I was wondering if anyone had tips for packing electronics during a cross country (USA) move? We have a variety of thing we’d rather not lose to damage:
Some seem straightforward to pack, but things like the hard drives have many options, so I’d appreciate input. Don’t have any original boxes, or experience with such moves.
I think the most important part is probably just to pack things securely, and make sure you remove anything like CPU heatsink or PCIE cards so that they don’t tear the motherboard apart in transit. Pack those separately and carefully.
Discs could be challenging if shipping through a company, so you may want to just take those on your person.
HDDs are for sure the thing to be the most careful with here (and any PCIe devices that might break PCIe slots). HDDs can be very easy to break, you hear stories all the time of people who move drives across a parking lot or into a different DC and a ton of them die. So I would prioritize that as the thing you pack the safest and maybe use actual HDD shipping materials.
if possible just backup the critical stuff to backblaze untill you confirm all your stuff is fine after the move.
I did this also for inter-island change of residence.
You also need an ungodly amount of bubblewrap around your HDDs. Hand carry them carefully yourself as well.
The last time I sold a batch of drives and shipped those I packed each one in their own box with bubble wrap, and then put all the boxes in a bigger box also padded with bubble wrap.
Generally speaking if you really love it, or it needs special handling, then don’t trust a moving company with it if at all possible and take care of that yourself.
Yeah, don’t be like Amazon with just an anti static bag and no wrap in a microwave sized box…
i always use a HD shipping container. it is foam with inserts cut for the HD. available in lots of sizes. here is what the foam in the box looks like.
I got a couple of these when I ordered a couple large shipments.
Didn’t ask for them, but super useful
i can only comment on the builds themselves, the others have done well explaining the harddrives.
This is actually a really good point, and if you use B2 for it they charge by the hour with no minimum requirement, so just doing it for the space of the move will be dirt cheap.
Thanks I was about to order from them…
Been a while, but I had good l luck with the styrofoam drive holder. All hard drives working with a clean scrub.
I ended up buying big antistatic bags, covering all my components and wrapping them with lots of honeycomb paper. Worked well but means I disassembled each desktop. They needed dusting anyway 
.
Thanks 
Glad you and your equipment got there safely!
Bruh, did your move took a total of 4 months or did you have 3+ months of prep time?
Or, 1 week for a move, then 11 weeks use to confirm stability?
That would actually be decent time for the Oregon Trail, it’s all about perspective 
About 3 months of heads up, 1 month to execute the move, 1 month forgetting to post here 
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