A user on Reddit’s r/DataHoarder has shared their brilliant technique to grab heaps of storage at lower costs. Seeing HDDs’ absurd prices in the UK, user cgtechuk calculated that booking a flight to the US to bring back a bunch of 28TB drives in the luggage would end up being cheaper than getting them locally.
Some pretext is necessary. With the surging costs of SSD storage, data centres have started switching to more cost-efficient HDDs to save the massive amounts of data they create. In turn, this has caused a spike in HDD demand, causing its prices to skyrocket too, surging by 46% since September 2025. Seeing this while in need of upgrading a 4x16TB storage setup, cgtechuk the clever idea to book a short trip to New York and buy some HDDs at much more reasonable prices was born.
The Redditor opted for ten Seagate Expansion 28TB external hard drives, each costing the equivalent of £244. For comparison, these same drives are listed in the UK at around £568, meaning a 57% saving. Even when factoring in the 20% import VAT – making them around £300 each – the flight and hotel charges, the final cost ended up being lower, netting cgtechuk some nice savings. Understandably, this maths only works if you buy a sizeable number of drives; but still, if you need a lot of something, a free trip plus savings is a hard combo to pass by.
Note, however, that this project needed a bit of preparation as cgtechuk reported had to split the purchase into multiple stores due to per-cart unit limitations. Apparently, both Best Buy and B&H Photo impose a five-drive limit, forcing cgtechuk to juggle between the two. After some slight hiccups with the payment method and once the stores confirmed the orders, the Redditor took a flight to New York, picked everything up from the store and headed to the hotel.
Aware of the increasing scams related to storage devices, cgtechuk decided to record the whole process, including pickup, unboxing, and testing. The latter was done using a variety of Seatools, Crystal, and file copies to make sure these were true 28TB HDDs. Making sure the capacity is legit is probably the most time-consuming and important test, since many scams disguise low-capacity drives as larger ones to avoid detection.
After making sure all drives were good, the Redditor packed them inside their luggage allowance, destined the UK. cgtechuk kept all the boxes just in case they were needed for a warranty return. The return flight was reportedly uneventful, leaving our clever data hoarder with enough NAS capacity for years to come.
