Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.jim-nielsen.com

411–420 of 465 posts

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

#411
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God, yeah. I try to label the USB-C cables directly by capability with my label maker, if they are more than basic charging cables.

I use a white paint pen. DATA and NO DATA.

I use wire cutters. Non-compliant cables get cut & discarded. I've got a dedicated USB condom with USB-PD support for cases where I want to block data, since those are always charging and I want the negotiation to work for fast charging.

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

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

You destroyed the drives by using an incompatible cable (I.e. clear user error) and they still sent you (upgraded) replacements? That is unusual.

I had RMA'd them before I found out about the cable issue. When I was about to put in the replacements, I noticed that the SATA power cable didn't look like the others, and did some research before I plugged them in. Up to that point, I thought I just had a pair of DOA drives from the same batch or something (which I thought was unusual and quite unlikely, but not impossible).

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

#415

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.

They aren't even consistent within manufacturer! They're standardized on the device side, but not the PSU side. So always check pinout before you make the very reasonable assumption that if it fits it works

They aren't even standard on the model! One of the brands swapped pin-outs mid production run (but same SKU number and no changes in model name/packaging); and even sent back a RMA'd replacement with a different set of pinouts, but no cable, causing the user to fry their PC.

They had to make a post on r/hardware to get the brand to cover the damage, but IIRC, they never paid for data recovery services for the damaged HDDs.

I like Corsair because they at least mark the cable types on both ends; and while their PSU range vary in quality; none are trash -- Type-4 is Type-4 (or at least, I haven't heard of any reports of mislabelling on that front).

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

#417

I threw all my cables away. You can buy new ones for under €25 so why bother saving that big unsighted box of old sticky usb cables?

Also: rent cost money, keeping track of stuff cost time and money. By all means keep it if you need it, but on some scale you can afford to re buy the new cable that you threw out from the savings of not dealing with clutter.

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

#418
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…

Transparent ziplock bags changed my cable organization significantly. I also put a lot of accessories into them. Preferably together with a small note about what it is for, or with the manual of the device it belongs to.

Storing stuff in individual boxes takes up too much space. The transparent bags can just go into a box and it's easy to just browse through. Nothing gets entangled.

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

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish the old cables, gear, etc. I have squirreled-away stopped saving Customers' and friends' asses because I could feel good about getting rid of it. What you've got to do is become more forgetful. Ask not what a 17v power supply can do for your friends. Ask if you'll remember it and find it when that moment comes.

Alternatively build a searchable inventory app with claude

because you surely will keep it updated...
Post reply on HN