I'm moving overseas and my server will be packed and shipped in a container with the rest of my belongings in a few weeks.  Truck, rail, boat, rail, truck or something like that to get from Canada to France.  It will be packed by professional movers.  That said, I don't necessarily trust them and will be supervising to ensure it's packed well.

 

Any advice on how to go about packing it?  Should I package drives separately?  I have the original box and Styrofoam the case came in.

 

The server is a Fractal Design Node 304 with 3 drives.  No massive heatsinks or anything like that.

 

Thanks!

If the data on the drives would be difficult to restore/reconstruct, given that you only have 3 drives, personally I'd pull them and pack them in my personal belongings. If that's not a concern then just make sure everything is well supported/attached in the case - nothing loose. Beyond that I'd double box it - back in the original box, then all of that in another box.

Thanks. I think I'll put the critical data on an external drive to carry with me, and I will replicate it onto my desktop and laptop so there are multiple copies just in case. 

Just a note... I work for a very large company and we ship entire racks of servers with the hard drives installed.  I don't think packing drives separately offers any protection.

 

Of course, we generally dont put our racks on a boat!

Just a note... I work for a very large company and we ship entire racks of servers with the hard drives installed.  I don't think packing drives separately offers any protection.

 

Of course, we generally dont put our racks on a boat!

 

My sister's family is military and I've seen the shape the household goods can show up in...  Suffice to say, you're probably making sure that your server racks are treated a lot better than standard overseas cargo transshipping... 

 

@Steven D - But so long as your critical data is backed up you should be in good shape.

I have also shipped whole racks in the past,  generally we just loaded them in a van and ratchet strapped them down.

 

We had backups of all of our data but not much stuff ever got broken and most of that could probably be put down to turning the equipment off rather than shipping....  old hardware doesn't like that sort of thing.

The drive cages in a typical computer case (e.g. a Fractal) aren't really designed to handle all the vibration your system is going to be subjected to with the drives installed.

 

The safe way to do this is to remove the drives and package them well in a small separate box -- do it well enough that you'd feel fine mailing that box.  You can then ship that box along with the computer (since you have good backups of the data) .. and simply replace the drives in the system when you get to France.

 

Extremely late followup.  So I didn't have time before the move to pull and wrap the drives individually.  In fact the movers packed my server when I wasn't paying attention and I had no idea where or how it was packaged....  Thankfully I caught them before they started on my guitars....

 

The good news is that the server arrived in one piece and has worked fine over the last 6 months.  The movers were far more likely to break large and oddly shaped things, it turns out.

... The movers were far more likely to break large and oddly shaped things, it turns out.

 

Glad your server made it okay even without a bit more preparation ==> Sorry to hear that (apparently) your guitars weren't quite as lucky 

I would have stabbed the movers in the throat if they would have so much had looked in the direction of my servers without asking.

... The movers were far more likely to break large and oddly shaped things, it turns out.

 

Glad your server made it okay even without a bit more preparation ==> Sorry to hear that (apparently) your guitars weren't quite as lucky 

 

This was an unintentional implication.  The guitars arrived safely, I suspect in part due to my attention in ensuring they were packed carefully.  "large, oddly shaped things" referred to tables, bbqs and electric pianos... 

 

I would have stabbed the movers in the throat if they would have so much had looked in the direction of my servers without asking.

 

Have to pick my battles these days.