How to store and manage thousands of electronic components for all your design projects

In this article, we walk you through how we came to what we believe is an optimal component storage solution for most small electronic labs and home hobbyists. The following text contains links to the actual products we use or have used at one point. Clicking on the links does give us a small commission but costs you nothing. Thank you for your support.

Custom Circuit Solutions has been developing custom electronic projects for nearly 30 years, and every one of those projects has required assembly. Over that time, the assembly landscape has changed significantly. Thirty years ago, machine assembly of circuit boards was possible, but the number of available vendors was limited and costs were substantially higher than they are today. Low-cost overseas assembly options were not yet accessible.

As a result, in our early years, nearly all projects were assembled by hand. Today, with the availability of affordable assembly services and the widespread use of higher-density components, hand assembly is typically reserved for small prototype builds or projects that require the fastest possible turnaround.

For every one of those hand-built projects, we had to figure out how to manage the hundreds of BOM line items and thousands of small components. Our solution to the problem has evolved multiple times throughout the years.

In the early years, each project was self-contained to a project box which. We literally kept each box in a dedicated plastic organizing bin so that that if we needed to build additional units we could quickly retrieve the entire project. While this worked with a small number of projects, as we grew two issues became clear. First, many of the project boxes had few parts, wasting significant storage space. The second issue was many of those parts were never used again. When a new project came in, we would order the same parts over and over again even if we had them sitting on the shelf within another project box.  

When the project box solution became unmanageable, we took the approach of no longer keeping parts dedicated to a specific project. Rather, we began combing all parts of the like into dozens of storage organizing drawers, such as those from Akro-Mils. We had dozen of these storage units for resistors, capacitors, magnetics, connectors, and other small components. This solved the problem of redundant and wasted components but did little to solve the problem of wasted space. In fact, it made the problem worse. For example, if you dedicate one small drawer to one 0603 resistor size. Nearly 99.9% of the space is wasted. Sure, you could throw a divider in each bin and reduce the number of storage units in halve but the problem is that unless you glue in and seal off the bottom of the dividers, the small parts will migrate under the dividers and become intermixed. Even so, the amount of space wasted is still more than 99%.

Our inventory of components continued to grow over the year, the amount of organizing bins required, and shelf space to house them all, became overwhelming, leading us to continue to look for more efficient storage solutions.   

The most significant amount of wasted space in our inventory was a result of the small passive components such as 0603 and 0402 capacitors and resistors. With thousands of these different components, we needed to find a much smaller organizing unit. The solution that most turn to are the pill box style organizers. While we looked at these, these pill box storage containers are known to have their own issues. In our particular use case, we could not use these for two primary reasons. One, the unit is rather large, so keeping it in front of you while you solder and making the components readily available was not possible. It had to be put off to  the side of the work table where it was not convenient to reach the components. Secondly, the opening to these small container units is almost too small. We could not get our curved tweezers into the small box and pickup the resistors / capacitors flatly. We would have to use one set of straight tweezers to pick out one small component, lay it down flat, and then switch to our other curved set of tweezers.  

Because of these short comings, we set out to find an optimal sized small container unit. After searching for solutions, we ultimately settled on a really small flat plastic container. They are a fraction of the size of the Akro-Mils storage drawers, so far less space is wasted, they have just a large enough opening so we can easily pickup components with out angled tweezers, they are still big enough to be easily labelled, and there was an additional benefit. The size of these micro containers allowed them to be arranged easily within the larger drawers of the organizing storage drawers that we already had. In the case of both our Akro-Mils organizers and the newer Craftsman units we had, we could fit up to 28 of our individual micro containers within one large drawer. For one cabinet with 18 of these large drawers, we could fit 504 individual component types. Contrast this with an Akro-Mils organizer cabinet with a maximum of 64 small drawers. In other words, we were able to reduce the number of organizing cabinets by almost a factor of 10 to 1. Needless to say we now use these containers for storing all our small passive components.  

However, not all our components fit in these small micro organizing boxes. We still rely on the organizing cabinets that we have been using for decades for larger components. But, two things have changed over the years. Initially, we only purchased storage cabinets from Akro-Mils. They were the primary manufacturer out there for such units. The quality was good and the prices were reasonable. That however did change over the years. They eventually changed from a metal cabinet with solid drawers to a plastic housing frame and flimsy plastic drawers. The pricing also dramatically increased and when you needed dozens of these units, that became a significant consideration. We then started looking at organizing units from other manufacturers.

There are three or four other manufacturers of organizing drawer units. IRIS USA is the second largest seller of these units out there. While they produce nice units, none of their drawer sizes have slots to support any dividers, which can be a big negative when you need to try to maximize the drawer space and accommodate a large number of components. There are a number of other manufacturers that sell similar units. These include Amazon basic, GreenPro, Homak, Stalwart, as well as others. While some of these were tolerable, some such as the Amazon Basic version, were complete garbage and should be avoided at all costs. A complete review of many of these items can be found on the Bin Better website.

The one unit that we currently prefer is sold and distributed under different names. We typically refer to these as Craftsman brand but the exact same unit can be found under the name Black and Decker, ArtBin, and Stanley. The primary reasons we have switched to the Craftsman brand is they are of higher quality than Akro-Mils, they have more slots within the bins for divider options, and they are about half the price. For these reasons, we typically only purchase the Craftsman brand of storage organizing units.

One effective method for optimizing storage cabinet space is the strategic use of dividers within individual drawers. Dividers allow multiple component types to be stored in a single drawer, reducing the total number of cabinets required and improving overall space efficiency. However, the usefulness of dividers varies significantly by manufacturer. Akro-Mils cabinets, for example, support only a single divider per bin, which limits how finely the drawer can be partitioned. Other brands, such as IRIS-USA and some Stalwart models, do not support dividers at all, making it difficult to adapt the drawer space to changing inventory needs. In contrast, Craftsman cabinet drawers support up to three dividers per drawer out of the box, making them significantly more flexible and better suited for organizing a wider variety of component sizes.

To further increase storage density beyond what standard manufacturer dividers allow, we developed the Bin Better configurable drawer divider solutions that enable far more granular partitioning of each drawer. Depending on the drawer design and manufacturer, these configurable dividers allow a single drawer to be divided into anywhere from 3 to as many as 12 individual sections, with numerous configurations possible in between. This approach makes it possible to tailor each drawer to the exact mix of components being stored, maximizing usable space while maintaining clear separation and labeling. While we do not recommend using any divider-based solution for very small components—such as surface-mount resistors and capacitors—due to the risk of parts sliding under dividers and becoming intermixed, this method works exceptionally well for larger components. Items such as small connectors, headers, LEDs, and other mechanically robust parts benefit greatly from divider-based organization, allowing for dense, flexible, and highly efficient use of drawer space without sacrificing accessibility or order.

Efficient electronic component organization is not just a matter of convenience—it directly impacts productivity, space utilization, and costs. Through decades of hands-on experience, we have learned that no single storage solution fits every component type. Rather, an optimized system requires a flexible approach.

For the smallest passive components, traditional drawer-based organizers waste an enormous amount of space and money. By adopting compact micro containers that fit within larger drawer systems, we were able to dramatically increase storage density, improve component accessibility during soldering, and reduce the overall footprint of our inventory by nearly an order of magnitude. Larger components continue to benefit from traditional organizing drawers, but careful selection of cabinet brands and thoughtful use of dividers can significantly improve your storage optimization.