How should I transport my unenclosed hard drive?

August 12, 2013 7:39 PM

My old laptop finally failed, and I want to take the hard drive home with me. The laptop is gigantic, and I don't want to lug it home on the train. I am leaving tomorrow morning. I don't have a static-resistant bag, and won't have time to get one before I leave. What's the best way to transport my unenclosed hard drive in my luggage? Assume I don't have any tin foil, paper bags, or cardboard boxes. I do have paper towels, regular towels, packing tape, plastic bags, and bubble wrap.
posted by topoisomerase to Technology (10 answers total)

Personally, I'd put it in a plastic bag, wrap lots of bubble wrap around it, tape over the bubble wrap secure it, and put it in another plastic bag.
posted by bluecore at 7:45 PM on August 12, 2013

Static might be a concern, as you implied, but shock really isn't these days. Put it in a plastic bag.
posted by Renegade Duck at 7:47 PM on August 12, 2013

Absent anti-static packaging, the best thing to do is leave it in the laptop, and lug the whole thing home. Otherwise, there's a pretty good chance that static charges will damage circuitry on the drive controller board, particularly if you package it in a common polyethylene bag, like a Ziploc bag, or a polystyrene bag like a shopping bag.

I have heard of people saturating old cotton rags with laundry anti-static spray, and wrapping a drive up in those, before putting the drive in a standard polyethylene bag, but I have no empirical evidence this actually works, and if you choose to do this, I'd suggest you temporarily tape over the air pressure equalization hole in the drive housing, so that you don't get volatile compounds from the spray inside the drive platter and head area.
posted by paulsc at 7:59 PM on August 12, 2013

Best answer: How gigantic is gigantic? Presumably you've lugged it around before, why not just this one last time?

Could you check with a friend and get your data from the HDD onto a USB stick? Laptop HDDs are all the same size (with rare exceptions) - get somebody to download something like Hiren's (http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd) and burn it to a disc, take the HDD out of their laptop, put your HDD in, boot up with the disc, copy the contents of the HDD onto the USB stick, remove HDD, bingo.

That said, people make a lot of noise about static ruining hard drives and I'm sorry but I've never seen it. Take an old cereal box and cut it appropriately and wrap it around the HDD a few times, double-up if you gotta, then put it in a plastic bag and wrap the lot in an old towel or something, you'll be fine.
posted by turbid dahlia at 8:09 PM on August 12, 2013

Assume I don't have any tin foil

OK. Then your first job is to go and find some tinfoil.

After you've wrapped the drive in tinfoil to protect it against electrostatic discharge, copious bubble wrap and plenty of packing tape and you're done.
posted by flabdablet at 8:12 PM on August 12, 2013 [3 favorites]

Personally I'm far more worried about jostling and max acceleration impulse when transporting a drive than with static. I'd carefully wrap it to the same padding standard that you'd use to transport an unboxed wine glass, and then I'd make every effort to gingerly carry it in a messenger bag or backpack that remains with me, instead of letting someone throw it into the baggage compartment.
posted by ceribus peribus at 9:10 PM on August 12, 2013 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Could you check with a friend and get your data from the HDD onto a USB stick? Laptop HDDs are all the same size (with rare exceptions) - get somebody to download something like Hiren's (http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd) and burn it to a disc, take the HDD out of their laptop, put your HDD in, boot up with the disc, copy the contents of the HDD onto the USB stick, remove HDD, bingo.

Very few people in my age group have PCs, so this sort of strategy wouldn't work. I'm doing this because I don't have a USB to 2.5" hard drive connector cable with me (it's at home). The old laptop won't turn on for more than a minute, even if I boot from a USB stick with Hiren's on it, or a boot disk, so I want to bring the hard drive home so I can use the cable. And it's 500 GB of data (largely backed up, I promise!), so it's too much for something like a USB stick anyway. It's just easier to drag it home and move all my files from the old hard drive to my new laptop than it is to cobble everything together from my backups (which are all in different places and from varying points in time, because I didn't want to subscribe to an online service and didn't have external media that was large enough to back it all up in one go).

I actually never used to carry the laptop around because it was so huge. It was more of a desktop replacement. I'm taking the train, so everything I'd bring with me would be in front of me under the seat. It's not like the hard drive's going to get jostled in the hold of an airplane or anything.

I think I'll go with the cereal box + plastic bag + copious amounts of bubble wrap and tape. Thanks, guys.
posted by topoisomerase at 9:46 PM on August 12, 2013

Fair enough. ESD won't damage what's on the platters, so if you're OK with the prospect of paying for drive disassembly and data recovery, what you're proposing should be fine.
posted by flabdablet at 10:06 PM on August 12, 2013

Best answer: ESD is a problem in shipping because the jostling causes the case to rub against whatever it is wrapped in and build up static charges. If you can't find tinfoil or an antistatic bag, wrap it in something that is not static-inducing like wax paper or newsprint. Wrapping it in plastic is worse than nothing at all.
posted by gjc at 5:09 AM on August 13, 2013

Response by poster: The drive totally survived, and I recovered all my data. Thank you, Metafilter! Cereal boxes forever!
posted by topoisomerase at 6:33 PM on August 31, 2013