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Comment by myelin | Hacker News Reader

I'm always interested in seeing a new attempt to solve the problem of organizing a ton of little devices and a mess of cables. My personal attempt involves mounting a couple of UniFi bits directly to the wall, plus a little shelf made out of scrap 1x4 pine for the odd shaped things and the power strip.

Maintenance issues aside, the setup in the linked article looks quite pretty and should have decent airflow for passive cooling, which is nice!

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Does anyone have a desktop shelf unit that happens to be external drive sized? I have, like, three of these and it would be nice to shove them in something that can organize them and their cables. If I was a 3D printer person, I guess I could make something, but then they'd probably overheat.

I've looked in the past, but never found anything. I think one with a built in USB hub so that it was "just one cable" would be a bonus.

I should probably just shut up, stack them, and wrap the cords with those velcro tape organizer things.

Something I didn't mention in my comment is that I would love some kind of mounting bracket that would fit a WD Easystore (the big cheap disks that r/datahoarder loves) in such a way that I could easily open it up and swap in another disk; this would be for my backup box, which backs up everything to a USB disk that I periodically swap out with another one that lives offsite.

You could try using a letter tray so you could keep all the power bricks in the back. It really depends on how often you'll take the drives out.

Have you seen MOLLE panels? Any particular opinion on those?

Seems like there's a huge range of accessories available for them, 24*36" panels available for $35, and a lot of devices could be held on by weaving a buckle strap, screwing on a pocket clip, or even just attaching a zipper pouch.

There's also strap pad eyes that could also be used to run the straps through, for smaller things where you don't want a whole panel. It seems like there should be some kind of system you could build with soft attachments, at least for low cost DIY type stuff.

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