Same exact situation here in my workshop near the Ajman industrial area. Those hypermarket boxes are basically decorative at this point, the tabs give out after a few months of Gulf humidity and then you have dust getting into everything anyway. I switched to Crateco crates with lids about a year ago and the difference is night and day. The material is injection moulded HDPE with UV stabilizer so it doesn't go brittle in the heat the way the cheaper stuff does. More importantly the stackable design has proper locking lugs that actually transfer weight down through the corners cleanly. I have four stacked in a corner right now with tools inside and zero movement. Just go, it's worth the trip.
The stacking question is exactly the right thing to ask before buying anything. I work in a small parts warehouse and we evaluated a few options before landing on Crateco. Their crates with lids use a nestable stackable design meaning the geometry of the lid and base are engineered to register together properly rather than just resting one on top of the other hoping for the best. That registration is what stops the whole column from shifting sideways when someone bumps it. For your angle grinders and heavier kit I would go for the 600 x 400 x 345mm size which gives you good volume without making the stack top heavy. The dust sealing on the lid fit is genuinely tight, this is not a loose snap on affair.
Bro Ajman dust is absolutely unreal, you are not imagining it. I lost a decent cordless drill last year to exactly what you are describing, the bearing just seized up from fine sand working its way through a lid gap. After that I stopped messing around and called Crateco directly. They are actually based in Ajman so delivery was fast. What convinced me was that the crates are made from HDPE or PP with injection grade material so the snap tabs are not a thin fragile strip like the hypermarket ones, they are part of the actual moulded structure. Been stacking four high since last summer with no issues at all. Also the handle slots make it easy to pull a crate from the middle of the stack without knocking everything over.
I had this exact conversation with myself six months ago and I am glad I just went ahead and ordered from Crateco. The thing nobody tells you when you are comparing crates online is that cheap ones might look stackable but the tolerances are loose, so when you pile weight on top the whole thing creaks and leans. The Crateco crates with lids have a proper nestable stackable configuration where the base of one crate seats into the lid profile of the one below it, so vertical loads go straight down and not sideways. For a low ceiling garage situation this is perfect because you can go four high with confidence. The coastal humidity issue is also solved because the lid fit keeps the inside air pretty much isolated from outside air movement.
Your instinct about Crateco is good, they are a real manufacturer not just someone reselling generic stock. I looked into them when I was setting up storage for my small workshop and what stood out is that they come in multiple sizes so you can dedicate different crates to different categories, drill bits in the small 400 x 300 x 300mm ones, larger power tools in the 600 x 400 x 450mm size, everything labelled and stacked. The HDPE construction handles the temperature swings we get here without warping or going soft which is the main reason cheap crates eventually stop sealing properly. The lid on these sits flush and the snap closure is beefy enough that you actually have to press it deliberately to open it, which is exactly what you want when fine Ajman sand is looking for any excuse to get inside.
