In the United Kingdom, the price of high-capacity storage units is reaching high levels. So much so that it is becoming more attractive to buy hard drives in the United States and bring them back. Worse still, the operation is profitable since the person makes a substantial saving of $2,000! A completely crazy story, but one that reflects the pricing environment we are currently experiencing.
It is more economically viable to fly to the United States to buy hard drives than to order them in the United Kingdom!
This is the story of cgtechuk on Reddit, who said he wanted to upgrade his NAS and expand the storage capacity of his device. He checked the prices and quickly realized how crazy expensive it would be to buy in the UK. Yes, we’re talking about the equivalent of $980.46 per IronWolf 28TB drive in Europe versus “only” $609.99 in the United States.
He then reserved ten drives at two different stores (Best Buy and B&H Photo), which had a limit of five units per order. He booked his flight to New York and a hotel for several days. However, fearing he might be scammed, as this kind of thing does happen, he took care to check each drive and make sure they were working properly at the hotel.
All that remained was to bring the cargo home, so he placed the hard drives in his carry-on luggage while keeping the packaging in his checked luggage. This would help prove that the drives were new if he was stopped at customs.
In any case, the key takeaway from this story is that the user has a NAS equipped with ten hard drives, each with a capacity of 28 TB. What’s more, he saved over $2,000, even after paying for the plane ticket and hotel. And as a bonus, he got to take a little trip to the United States. So he came out a winner on all fronts.
