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Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables

#171

Post by harshreality »

SmasherEpilepti wrote: post #106

Recently, I was screwed by my big box of cables, when I pulled out a SATA power connector for my modular power supply, and learned very quickly that though the ports universally fit across modular PSUs, the pinouts are not actually intercompatible, and you can and will fry your hard drives. I didn't know this; I had foolishly assumed that SATA power connectors were standardized on both ends.

A PSU cable tester is valuable for this. They're much cheaper than a replacement PSU, and you can plug in cables wherever they fit on a PSU, and test whether the output is correct for the CPU/PCI/motherboard/SATA connector you want to plug it into. The PSU and cable might be a black box, but the output is always testable.

Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables

#173

Post by mcapodici »

booty wrote: post #24

Key for me is to "group" cables. For example, I have a bag of USB-C cables, a bag of USB-A cables, etc. Grouping them is key to deduplicating. It's easy to look at a single legacy USB A-to-B "printer" cable in isolation and think "I might need this someday!" Because you really might need it someday. However, if you group them you might see that you have ten of them. And then you can get rid of... maybe 8 of them. I a…

Unless you are very short on space, keep all 10. Because 50-100% of them will randomly cease to work.

Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables

#174

Post by SmasherEpilepti »

fabian2k wrote: post #131
SmasherEpilepti wrote: post #106

Recently, I was screwed by my big box of cables, when I pulled out a SATA power connector for my modular power supply, and learned very quickly that though the ports universally fit across modular PSUs, the pinouts are not actually intercompatible, and you can and will fry your hard drives. I didn't know this; I had foolishly assumed that SATA power connectors were standardized on both ends.

That's an expensive mistake to make, though frying your HDDs is usually a lot cheaper than frying your GPU. It's seriously annoying that this is the case though. Unless you kept the cables in the original package or in a labelled container, you cannot safely use them again if you owned more than one modular PSU.

It wasn't actually very expensive in money, because I was still able to RMA the pair of fried drives, but it did cost me $30 in shipping, a month of waiting, a lost delivery via UPS, and tons of time dealing with customer support for both UPS and Seagate to actually get a second set of replacement drives.

On the bright side, the actual replacements that eventually got to me were both 2TB bigger than the originals. They didn't tell me about this, so I'm not sure if they silently upgraded me to apologize for the wait, it was an accident, or they happened to be out of stock and just grabbed the next size up.

Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables

#175

Post by SmasherEpilepti »

exe34 wrote: post #145
SmasherEpilepti wrote: post #106

Recently, I was screwed by my big box of cables, when I pulled out a SATA power connector for my modular power supply, and learned very quickly that though the ports universally fit across modular PSUs, the pinouts are not actually intercompatible, and you can and will fry your hard drives. I didn't know this; I had foolishly assumed that SATA power connectors were standardized on both ends.

Oh for crying out loud, I've spent my life believing if it fits it's right. %$@&#!

Better to learn from my experience than yours.

Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables

#176

Post by johnhtodd »

I will say that Vidmar, Lista, and Rousseau make thin drawer cabinets that work well for cables if you have graduated from "big box of cables" to "cabinets full of cables". Also, old map or blueprint drawers work well. Still requires obsessive coiling, but being able to see (semi-random access) all of them in a drawer all at once is a big speed improvement for searches.

Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables

#177

Post by demritocracy »

OroPla wrote: post #159
booty wrote: post #24

Key for me is to "group" cables. For example, I have a bag of USB-C cables, a bag of USB-A cables, etc. Grouping them is key to deduplicating. It's easy to look at a single legacy USB A-to-B "printer" cable in isolation and think "I might need this someday!" Because you really might need it someday. However, if you group them you might see that you have ten of them. And then you can get rid of... maybe 8 of them. I a…

Remember CD spindles? Those are were a quarter of my cables live now. They can be stacked! There's also a few boxes and one tech bag. Also, the 15m (50ft) HDMI cable doesn't fit anywhere so it got it's own space.

A secret I've found is use hair ties instead of rubber bands with cables, they survive long stints in the garage much better

Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables

#178

Post by asciimov »

I used to think this way, but now I know better.

My dad passed a few years back, this past year I spent a considerable amount of time helping my mom and sister tame all his junk. So much junk was tossed or donated, very little was kept and even less sold. Not wanting to burden my family with all of my junk I started working on my own hoard this summer. Letting go wasn't easy, but once it was done I felt less burdened by it.

And yes like clockwork a week after tossing it all I needed some random cable. I spent a couple of bucks for one at Walmart of all places, but Amazon and ebay would have had my back if that cable hadn't been there.

If you have a similar junk box, you have my permission to just throw it away. Don't look in it, don't worry about it, just toss it. You do not need to be carrying so much junk. You do not need 20 year old ethernet cables, 30 year old scsi and ide cables, or 40 year old audio cables. You can buy new ones, in new condition today, most of which are reasonably priced and wont produce random errors or noise due to internal faults.

tl;dr- You don't need it, toss it and do it today!

Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables

#179

Post by jimniels »

booty wrote: post #24

Key for me is to "group" cables. For example, I have a bag of USB-C cables, a bag of USB-A cables, etc. Grouping them is key to deduplicating. It's easy to look at a single legacy USB A-to-B "printer" cable in isolation and think "I might need this someday!" Because you really might need it someday. However, if you group them you might see that you have ten of them. And then you can get rid of... maybe 8 of them. I a…

Post author here.

I didn’t get into my organizational techniques, but agree with your take! Ziploc bags + a sharpie is exactly how I do it.

https://imgur.com/JMUIcDY

Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables

#180

Post by bsoles »

demritocracy wrote: post #177
OroPla wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember CD spindles? Those are were a quarter of my cables live now. They can be stacked! There's also a few boxes and one tech bag. Also, the 15m (50ft) HDMI cable doesn't fit anywhere so it got it's own space.

A secret I've found is use hair ties instead of rubber bands with cables, they survive long stints in the garage much better

I routinely steal my wife's hairbands to tie various cables in my cable stash. You can never have enough USB cables of various types. But as Murphy dictates, the USB cable that I need now is one that I don't have in my stash.
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