The price of hard drives in the UK is so high that people fly to the United States to buy them. Traveling halfway around the world can save a lot of money.

The price of hard drives in the UK is so high that one netizen chose to fly across the ocean to the United States to purchase it. Even if you include all expenses such as round-trip air tickets and hotels, you still end up saving more than $2,000. Reddit user u/cgtechuk shared this experience. He has been paying attention to the price of 28TB large-capacity hard drives in the UK for a long time and found that it continues to rise and never falls.I could never find the right time to buy it, so I finally decided to make a special trip to the United States after the New Year to purchase 10 hard drives of this specification at one time..

He encountered a small problem when purchasing. Both Best Buy and B&H Photo stores in the United States have purchasing restrictions. Each store can only buy a maximum of 5 yuan. To this end, u/cgtechuk placed orders at two stores. After confirming the order, he booked air tickets and hotels to New York and started his journey to buy hard drives across the ocean.

The reason why transoceanic purchases are more cost-effective can be seen from the comparison of the US and UK selling prices of the same hard drive on Amazon. The Seagate IronWolf Pro 28TB hard drive purchased this time,The unit price on Amazon in the United States is only US$609.99, and you can get further discounts if you catch up with the discount; while the unit price of the same model on Amazon in the UK is as high as US$980.46, and the price difference per unit is more than US$370..

When purchasing 10 hard drives, the unit price difference alone exceeds US$3,700. The cheapest round-trip ticket from London Heathrow to New York JFK is less than US$700, and four nights in a cheap hotel near the airport is about US$700. Plus US$300 pocket money, the whole trip costs about US$1,700.

After deducting these costs, the net savings is still about $2,000. It is worth mentioning thatu/cgtechuk also used points to redeem air tickets and hotels, actually saving more.

In order to prevent being cheated, u/cgtechuk recorded the entire process when picking up the goods from the two stores and checked and retained the serial number of each hard drive.. After arriving at the hotel, he used SeaTools and Crystal software to check the hard drives one by one, and also copied the files to confirm that the products were genuine and had no quality issues..

He then packed the hard drive with the original foam lining into his carry-on luggage, and the packaging box into his checked luggage to facilitate subsequent warranty repairs, which was very thoughtful.

Behind this seemingly extreme purchasing behavior is the global environment of soaring hard drive prices.Although AI deployment mainly affects memory and storage chips, the hard disk market has gradually fallen into tight supply and rising prices. Since the third quarter of last year, global hard drive prices have increased by 46%. Western Digital also announced that all its hard drive production capacity in 2026 has been sold out, and the imbalance between supply and demand is obvious..

Although mechanical hard drives are far slower than solid-state drives, they are the core equipment for near-line storage in AI ultra-large-scale data centers. With the development of AI, the cost of solid-state drives has skyrocketed, and the price per unit capacity is up to 16 times that of hard drives. In order to control costs, data centers have switched to more cost-effective hard drives to store massive amounts of warm and cold data. The surge in demand directly pushes up global hard drive prices, ultimately putting pressure on ordinary consumers.

After u/cgtechuk's experience became popular, it sparked heated discussions among netizens. Some people lamented that the price of hard drives has increased exaggeratedly, while others ridiculed that this is the most cost-effective transoceanic trip.

Industry insiders predict that due to the strong demand for AI data centers and the difficulty in increasing hard drive production capacity in the short term, hard drive prices may remain high in the future, and similar cross-ocean purchases may occur again.