Moving House - Transporting Hard Drives Question

[ecosse]

Hi

I am hopefully moving house soon and I have a Supermicro chassis with 45 hard drives. Obviously the easiest way to move this is to move it with the hard drives in the chassis but I'm currently planning to take each drive out and bubble-wrap them individually + transport separate to the chassis. Am I being overcautious?

 

[Evan]

I would just ship them inside the chassis.
Just re-seat them on arrival before power up.
Of course pack the chassis in foam and box.

Many vendors ship with drives inserted so I can’t see it being any issue at all.

 

[T_Minus]

Are you shipping or transporting yourself?

If driving yourself I would put the chassis on some bubbles/foam to cushion road bumps/vibrations if shipping I would separate them if it was me.

 

[ecosse]

Thank you for your replies guys. I'm going to move these myself, if they are going to break its going to be down to my driving incompetence Unfortunately there wasn't much space in the old house so I haven't many chassis boxes left. I'll probably do a bit of both as I've only got 1 or 2 of those big boxes (might try to get some more foam though!) - cheers

 

[marcoi]

when i moved, I left the 8 or so WD red 8 TB drives in the SM 2u chassis. I then put chassis back in the original SM box it came in (still had it). I put the box in the PackRat/Pod and had it locked in place. (IE it wasnt moving) When i got to my location and the pod was delivered, the box was in the same location, I took it out and when it came out of the box I re-seated all the drives. It fired up without issues. Been over 2 months running (in freenas setup) without any issues. Trip was from NH to FL, and it was out of my hands (pod) for a week.

 

[Terry Kennedy]

Unfortunately there wasn't much space in the old house so I haven't many chassis boxes left. I'll probably do a bit of both as I've only got 1 or 2 of those big boxes (might try to get some more foam though!) - cheers

All of the SC836 chassis I've received from Supermicro have had a note in the packaging stating that the packaging was only for shipping an empty chassis. They probably have additional protection in the packaging they use for complete systems.