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.

I put my cables in bags then in a box. I can't tell you how helpful the bags are. It only took me like an hour to sort the first time. But it's already saved me hours only a year later. Those 5 minutes of searching add up. Just fight the laziness and don't let entropy increase. It's *far* easier to stay organized than it is to organize

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 also (mostly) put individual cables into baggies. You can get clear 2mil generic ziploc style baggies for super cheap on Amazon or elsewhere. $15 for 200 or something. Prvents tangles and way less effort than wrapping or tying them.

In 2021 I cut the end off a USB cable to expose the power leads which I scotch taped to the power meter on my bike to charge it. I kept that cable. In 2024 I used it to add USB disconnects to the light strip I attached to the bottom of my son's crib, allowing me to keep the light strip intact when we lowered the base from the baby height to the toddler height. A week later we got rid of the strip because we really didn't need the light like that any more. Still, no regrets. This was my version of using every part of the buffalo.

Very funny comedy about this kind of stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6wZUV1t1y0

Long-time believer in big box of cables, and it has paid off so many times.

My "box" evolved to be 18 of those Sterilite clear plastic shoeboxes. It's a good size, and fits on most shelves, or you can even stack them, and then you can actually find the cables when you need them (unlike when I used a single huge plastic tote).

Every ~5 years, I would go through and cull, and give away needlessly redundant cables. (No, I will probably never need a dozen VGA cables, but keep 1 short and 1 long.)

Then came the mega-culling this year. In preparation for likely having to move away from Boston for the next job opportunity, I trimmed it down to only a few shoeboxes. After I sold my homelab gear and most of my old ThinkPads.

And I still probably have 1-2 of the right cable for most any generation and connector combination of USB, and assorted other specimens I might plausibly ever need.

(Note on giving away cables: On this last culling, I had about a 1/2 no-show rate for people picking up free cables, even for super-easy pickup in a dense residential area, walking distance from MIT and Harvard. So I photographed dozens of lots of cables, most lots priced at $1, and put up a gallery on CraigsList. Much better followthrough of people showing up, most buyers bought many items, and I made about $100. Only makes economic sense it you consider it a relaxing break, to find good homes for e-waste, plus a tiny bonus of cash for buying future e-waste.)

(Selling cheap, there's one consumer psychology thing that can work against you. Example: something like, a guy wanted to buy a $20-value cable I was selling for $2, and wanted me to go meet him in front of MicroCenter. I told him sorry, the long wasn't worth it for $2, and he said it was the same situation on his end. I didn't say, if he was otherwise going to buy the cable for $20 at MicroCenter, that walk/drive was worth closer to $18 to him, though it was worth no more than $2 to me.)

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.

We've been unspooling the stash of wood off-cuts, bits of copper pipe, and misc. broken or trash-picked parts from my late grandfather's workshop for the last few years. He always seemed to have materials at-hand to fix anything and, as a kid, I was in awe of that. Now I understand why.

I hope I can leave less stuff for my daughter to poke thru, but at the same time I want to be like my grandfather, seemingly being able to fix anything immediately.

I'm terrified of not being able to find old USB cables.

My D2A converter I use to route TV audio to a small amplifier died. It was cheap, but decent. I wanted another cheap one. I had trouble finding any. Finally, I snagged a pair on Amazon/eBay, but it used ancient USB connections. Luckily, I had old USB cables, so I'm good. But what will I do if the USB cable stops working?

The trouble with old cables is after years they can become "tacky" or "melt" softer plastics they come into contact with. So storage is important.

Only one big box of cables! What an amateur.

You need at least 4. And another one for power supplies.

How about obsolete cables? IDE, RG59 coax, Cat 5, Composite video, etc...

You’re not serious about it if you only have one box

As an aside, learn to properly care for cables. There are several YouTube videos on this topic, typically from musicians. Most importantly for small molded cables, avoid sharp bends and stress on the wire near the ends. Just a loose coil is much better. And the “over under” method for long cables avoids getting them twisted up.

In my big box of cables I have, among other things, a double-ended USB-A cable. I understand that this is absolutely not standards compliant, and I have absolutely no idea of where I got it from. I have never used it. But it is a thing that exists.

Getting rid of almost 10 different proprietary charging cables for pre-smart phones and some old laptops felt great though :P

I periodically go through the big box of cables and pull out anything that I don't expect to ever need again.

I put those in another box, seal it completely, and write a message on the outside along the lines of "presumed useless - Sep 2016".

If I come across that box in, say, September 2026, I feel entirely comfortable tossing the whole thing.

10% of my garrage... okay, exxagerating - but at least 0.1% is the big box of cables of who the fuck knows what ... including several firewire, and really old nintendo, and some that I forgot what it was about...

I see those boxes at estate sales regularly. And on FB marketplace for free or $5. Or sometimes somebody thinks they're sitting on a gold mine of technological history and tries to ask actual money for a box of 20 year old tangles.

Sometimes hoarding stuff pays off. It's usually just hoarding.

I have a rack of boxes of cables in my home, its not that out of the ordinary since I'm in the industry and am the network admin for my entire block in my housing community.

The other day I was fabberglased I could not find an HDMI to HDMI cable! HDMI > DVI yes, to VGA yes, to display port yes, to mini-HDMI yes. it was so shameful, for me having to go to amazon/best buy to purchase an HDMI cable is the lowest of the low.

If you have children, at least one of them may become fascinated with retro hardware, and play with all of this stuff, reinstalling OS and connecting old drives. Once they grow past that phase, THEN you can bring everything to the e-Waste center :)

We have a local thrift store that sorts and stores the cables very nicely. 95% of the time I can find exactly what I need right away.

That doesn't mean I don't also have my big box of cables, but just offering an alternate strategy.

Whoever does need it, I give you permission to throw out all your old cables, power adapters, and routers. Yes, on the off chance you do decide you need a Palm III dock, Linksys WRT54G, or Sony PSP charger that means you'd have to buy one on Ebay, but you can cross that $10 bridge if it actually happens.

My cable box is my retirement fund. Copper prices are rising, and scrap-metal dealers pay pretty well for it. But jokes aside: last year I also sorted some out and took 10 kilos of household cables to the local scrap-metal dealer here in Germany and got €30 for them. Better than throwing them away.

Clear Hefty Slider bags are perfect for this! I have my cable boxes (Hefty Hi-Rise) filled with these bags, USB -A to USB-C, USB -C to USB-C (then sub-bagged with 65w, 100w, 240w) and so on.

Point is, use clear bags so you can see inside, and Hefty makes the slider version. I get the gallon and half gallon bags for this, and then the quart size as well. This is the Marie Kondo technique and it's amazing for keeping all these cables which are always coming in handy!

I keep the duplicates, because you never know which color and length is going to be the perfect fit for the current need!

1. it is easy to buy a cable and have it delivered to your home in 24 hours 2. You have to be able to remember -where- the box of cables is 3. box of cables takes up space and clutters your environment

Throw out the box of cables.

I try to keep only 3 or 4 of the same cable, and if one gets damaged, I throw it away after the fourth or fifth time I look at it and wonder if I can fix it.

I had four big plastic totes full of cables. I pared them down to just one recently. I'm 90% happy with the move. It's ok to let go sometimes.

Reminds me of this Onion classic: https://theonion.com/jumbled-nest-of-cords-makes-move-to-thi...

I have a transparent plastic box of my own, with cables twist-tied and sorted into labeled zip bags.

The box stays, but cables come and go. I cleared out some PS/2 related cables recently, after not owning any hardware with that port for like a decade now.

Every now and then I look through the cables and take out the ones I no longer have hardware for. We have a cargo-tram every couple of months where you can bring things for disposal that don't go to normal garbage or recycling. Supposedly they recycle the cables but I suspect that means incinerating them (to generate electricity) and collecting the metal after.

Somewhere, deep in a storage tote, a UW SCSI cable I paid 50 bucks for at Fry's shows a glimmer of hope.

Wife forced me to consolidate my boxes of cables to a single bin. I joke the retail price of the bin is hundreds of dollars

At some point I need to go through my USB-A-C cables and figures out which ones are actually USB 3. Which only have power and which are USB2... Thankfully I think I have tester that can do that.

do yourself a favour and buy some zip mesh bag on amazon (often used for children's toy sorting; they're much more robust than zip-locks) and use them to group your cables. the big box(es) goes from a source of stress to an absolute delight.

Yesterday I found I still have a dozen firewire cables of different types but no devices to use them with. I put them in the possible recycle box.

I do have a big box 'o cables, though organization is getting difficult. I need some way to organize them into broad categories (USB, audio, power, ethernet, etc).

Oh never. I have 2 giant boxes of them. The absolute worst thing ever is when you need something like a USB or HDMI cable, and you're forced to spend like 40 bucks at Best Buy because you're in a pinch.

How on earth do you survive with just one big box of cables? I've got mine sorted into plastic storage boxes with labels, so things like 'Firewire' or 'Monitor' or 'SCSI' can get me to a particular box to sort through. I recently needed a SCSI-2 terminator to connect a CD-ROM drive to a 1990s sampler, and my box came up trumps. It's so pleasing when you find stuff like that...

Rubbermaid Roughneck half size of resealable bags of cables.

I still have quite a number of packing cubes with silicone-tie'ed and zip tie'ed cables.

I do want to mention though, a huge amount of cables can be replaced by usb-c cables + an adapter. You don't need a bus to HDMI cable: just get an adapter that has usb-c female, that your cable plugs into, that changes it to HDMI. Ditto for displayport, USB micro, USB b, USB a.

And for power VFLEX has a quite reasonably priced adapter to DC barrel jacks. I still have I dunno 70 power supplies, for laptops, gadgets and whatever. But at this point almost all my devices actually run on high efficiency gan usb-c power supplies. These once again follow the pattern: a usb-c female, then a pigtail (yay, better than fixed, like the HDMI), then the barrel jack.