I used to have a 5-drive unRAID setup. A few months ago I suddenly had to move overseas, and needed to find some way to transport both my NAS and my personal desktop to a different country. Trying to figure out a solution was difficult and painful.
Transporting the drives
The usual advice is to bring your drives as carry-on on the plane.
Airlines usually have a 7kg weight limit for the carry-on. A drive weighs about 0.8 kg, when you also add in padding and bubble wrap each drive averages about 1kg. Realistically, I can only bring a maximum of 6 drives in my carry-on unless I want to risk going past the weight limit.
However I also needed to bring my personal computer, I have a 3090 in my own computer and I wouldn’t want to put it in my suitcase and risk the airline losing it. If I also bring it as a carry-on then that adds 2kg, limiting the number of drives I can carry to 4.
Transporting other NAS components
The case, motherboard, and power supply are quite heavy. I also need to move my desktop as well. It is hard to carry them in my suitcase without going past the 20kg limit, it’s even more impossible to add them to my carry-on.
For my last trip I tried to sell my computer parts before leaving, but I wasn’t able to sell everything in time and also needed to discount the prices heavily to get anyone to even consider my computer parts.
What is the best way?
I still haven’t setup my NAS setup yet, I haven’t even checked if my 5 drives are working after moving overseas. I’m now starting to plan my next NAS build and I have a few questions.
Hard drives: According to reddit I should absolutely carry these as carry-on. For 3.5" drives that limits me to 4-6 drives. If I used 2.5" drives I could potentially carry more, but these are hard to come by and are more expensive. I’m planning to limit myself to 4 drives maximum, and buy higher capacity drives (e.g. 8TB).
Other components: Selling them locally then rebuying them after moving is extremely costly. I’m considering shipping the NAS (without the drives) separately but that requires I have a destination address to receive it.
I have a few questions:
- Am I necessarily limited to 4 drives? Is there a way to safely transport 5+ drives overseas?
- If I’m going to ship my NAS overseas, is it worth building a small form factor NAS? This would make shipping much easier, but limits me to 4 drives since that’s the max SATA ports most ITX boards have. SFF builds are also much more expensive.
You know abroad they also have HDD’s etc? As you haven’t setup your NAS yet, you don’t have it loaded with data yet (?) why not just get a new setup abroad?
Now if you really have to, and have to by air, yeh HDD’s in a carry on and PC on a suitcase. Alternatively if you still got the box that came witht he case, use that as they are typically well protected.
Get a large HDD, 16-20 TB, stuff everything you have in your nas there, and then build a new nas overseas
I’ve never had my carry on bag weighed.
Carry up to 20 with this baby:
I brought an 8 bay Synology from US to Europe. Pulled the drive and stuck them into a Pelican case and carried it by hand, and the Synology went into the suitcase. No one weighed it. TSA didn’t even bat an eye.
For my PC I kept the mobo, ram, CPU and drive. These were all still attached and in the motherboard’s original box. Left the case and PSU an CPU cooler. GPU went separately into an anti-static bag.
In my 20 years of travel, flying out of the US, no on gives a shit how much the carry on weighed as long as it fit in the sizing thing. In Europe they are more strict about the weights of carry on bags and can enforce it, but in my experience as long as it doesn’t look ridiculous they don’t usually hassle you.
If I have to do this again, I’d seriously consider switching to one of those new Asustor Flashstor 6 or 12 devices. I’m tired of dealing with HDs.