safely transporting hard drives overseas

[swamp_cabbage]

a question for you:

i have a bunch of 3.5" hard drives, all kept in separately-bought enclosures. i am in the uk, so the enclosures come with power supplies suitable only for this country.

i will be relocating to somewhere across the atlantic and it seems pointless to take the enclosures with me.

i dont have the original packing material that came with the drives so i am wondering how best to transport the drives. in hand luggage with towels wrapped around them!?

i am sure there is a sensible, shock-minimal solution to this. any suggestions?

 

[Makosuke]

They do make boxes built specifically to hold 10+ bare drives for shipment; they basically have a large block of foam with drive-sized slots cut into it. Such a thing shouldn't be particularly expensive, and seems like a worthwhile investment.

If you can't find one specifically built for that, you could makeshift one from one of those shipping cases that have foam you can cut to suit.

Whatever you do, you definitely want to put them all in anti-static bags first, as an added precaution. If you do go with the towel method, I'd additionally recommend adding some of those plastic clamshell cases that bare drives come in, to reduce pressure on inappropriate areas of the drives.

One question: In my experience, most external drive power bricks are good for the full 100-240V range of input, so you could easily take them with you, and all you'd need are replacement power cords with the correct plug on the end (which are cheap). Alternately, even if not, if the drive cases don't have built-in power supplies you could just get new power bricks and keep at least the case part.

Just seems like a waste if you're going to be buying new ones anyway (as opposed to a big RAID box or somesuch).