Hi Lemmy!
My partner and I are moving from the US to the EU soon. We both have gaming PCs but they’re a bit older, so we’re thinking it’s a great time to sell them, taking the SSDs, and buying new components there to avoid shipping them.
Any suggestions surrounding it? Maybe there’s a good way to pay a little and backup the whole SSDs to the cloud?
I know it’s not strictly gaming related but it sorta is? Sorry if this is inappropriate for the community
Buy a replacement SSD and stick it in there before selling. Reinstall Windows. Maybe buy a cheap key and reactivate the license. You can get a 1TB SSD for ~$60 these days.
A lot of people are going to want a “ready to play” PC.
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Great suggestion, I think making them ready to play might be the move
Double check prices first. I moved from Canada to the Euro and all electronics are about 20% more expensive here (when converting the currency). Including from the companies website (Google, Microsoft, Apple) so it’s not just a third party raising prices issue.
Oh that’s a great call. I’ll have to look and find the balance here between ship and buy.
Might be better off building a new one in the US and shipping it with your other stuff. Sales tax (import tax?) is pretty bad for electronics in the EU, stuff is a lot more expensive. Everything costs pretty much ~30% more.
You can package the computer in the box of the case and maybe take out the gpu and/or the cpu cooler and pack that separately so it doesn’t break in shipping.
How much stuff are you bringing? Are you getting like a shipping container for furniture, etc. or just essentials? Are you staying in one spot for long? If not, gaming laptops might suit you better (once again, cheaper to buy in the US).
Better, buy It and build it later. Not advisable having a fully built PC kicked across the ocean by “professional” couriers.
Very very little to move. Just what we can carry onto planes basically. Hoping to stay in a spot for many years, but you never know. The packaging is a good idea, I should price compare properly
That makes sense then, I wouldn’t trust the plane luggage handlers with the pc. In that case you’re probably right to sell. I would still price compare for a gpu or cpu and get the rest of the build later, but also heavily factor in the hassle of carrying stuff and basically not having a warranty for parts that you bought in the US.
I did actually move with my gaming pc twice. But I had most of my stuff shipped in a truck and only the essentials on the plane. You’ll probably end up having limited space/weight in the checked luggage anyway. Gool luck with the move!
Yeah, a truck would make me feel better. It’s definitely a risk to move it myself uninsured. For comparison, looks like post tax prices delivered of ~14-18% more in Denmark than the US where we are.
That’s a fair bit, but I’m not sure we’re in the market to try this hard to save a few hundred dollars in such a massive move. I lean towards selling, especially once we packed a big suitcase and it went VERY quick with stuff we love lol
Remember that prices in the US are before taxes (VAT) since they differ for each state and are calculated during checkout. I think I’d prefer to move -> buy than to buy -> move.
If the SSDs aren’t ancient and there’s something useful in them – sure. Steam already backs up save files – so it depends what you have on them to require redundancy on backing up somewhere.
They’re not super old, we’ve got some pics and such we like obviously. Maybe ~100 gigs total of “important files” but it sounds nice to have “my computer” back when I arrive?
If it’s around 100 gigs you can get the cheapest tier of Google Drive (200gb for about 3 bucks I think) for a few months.
Or just bring your ssd and don’t pay to use someone else’s computer
Aka stop feeding them stuff already .
Well as an insurance for the SSD breaking it’s an option. Just trying to help.
Generally, you want backups in three places, at least one off site for anything you deem important, so now’s a good time to start. SSD’s should travel fine as long as you take the right precautions regarding physical and static damage. Steam will handle most cloud saves, as will some other third party launchers. If you’re coming to the UK, I recommend Scan as a retailer.
For clarity, the recommendation is specifically 3 copies of your data, not 3 backups.
3-2-1 backup; 3 copies of the data, 2 types of storage devices, 1 off-site storage location.
So in a typical homelab case you would have your primary hot data, the actual device being used to create and manage that data, your desktop. You’d regularly backup that data into warm storage such as a NAS with redundancy (raid Z1, Z2, etc). Followed by regular but slower intervals of backups to a remote location, such as a duplicate NAS with a secure tunnel or even an external drive(s) sitting at a friend or family member’s house, bank vault, wherever. That would be considered cold storage (and should be automated as such if it’s constantly powered).
My own addition to this is that at least one of the hot / warm devices should be on battery backup in case of power events. I’ll always advocate that to be the primary machine but in homelab the server would be more important and the NAS would be part of that stack.
Cloud is not considered a backup unless the data owner is also the storage owner, for general reliability reasons related to control over the system and storage. Cloud is, however, a reasonable temporary storage for moves and transfers.
Absolutely price check parts before moving. I hear about parts overseas being priced way higher vs. the US depending on where you are.
The idea of having to get data through border checkpoints is giving me the sweats.
