EVERYTHING You Should Know About the HL15
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- čas přidán 19. 06. 2024
- The HL15 from 45Drives is here. It brings a lot of unique features and was built and designed with the HomeLab community in mind. In this in-depth review we'll cover everything you want to know about this new storage server.
Thank you to 45Drives for sending this unit!
You can get yours at: 45homelab.com/
Check out their forums for updates: forum.45homelab.com/
Other Parts:
- Universal Rack Shelves: amzn.to/3usoh9Q
- Blank PCIe Covers (Black): amzn.to/3sK8ZwE
- Blank PCIe Covers (White): amzn.to/3sLTSCY
- RGB Case Fans: amzn.to/3SURBAc
- Heavy Duty Noctua Fans: amzn.to/3QT2M9E
- 8 TB NAS Drives: amzn.to/3sUCz2x
- SATA DOM: amzn.to/3QT30h0
- Samsung NVMe: amzn.to/46o6v4R
- SuperMicro 2 NVMe PCIe Card: amzn.to/47ENblz
- SuperMicro 4 NVMe PCIe Card: amzn.to/3sNIdni
- 10g SFP+ to RJ45 Transceiver: amzn.to/3GbKonB
- Noctua CPU Cooler: amzn.to/46qHKFh
- 16 GB DDR4-3200 RDIMM RAM: www.ebay.com/itm/204230531994...
(Affiliate links may be included in this description. I may receive a small commission at no cost to you.)
Video Notes: technotim.live/posts/hl15-rev...
Mentions in this video:
- • Tuesday Tech Tip - Sto...
- • Enabling Staggered Spinup
- • Customizing My Storina...
Disclosures:
- I was not paid
- I was sent an HL15 for review
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00:00 - Introducing the HL15
00:59 - Purchasing Options
01:25 - Chassis / Case
03:13 - Motherboard & Connectivity
06:28 - CPU
07:39 - Backplane
09:14 - Power Supply
10:04 - Power Consumption & Efficiency
11:17 - Cooling & Fans
12:39 - OS & Software
16:09 - Hardware & Network Stress Test
17:57 - Price & Value
Thank you for watching! - Věda a technologie
WICKED video TIm !! Love this unit !!
Hell yeah, I've been waiting for this video.
Great video Tim! Thanks for sharing it with us!💖👍😎JP
It does look nice, but agreed, I think it's definitely out of most homelab's price range. Even worse when you say the $2,000 fully built system came and then you decide to upgrade the ram, and you probably want to upgrade the CPU, and then there is limited headroom on the power supply, so maybe upgrade that too. I think for a lot of homelab-ers if they were spending that much on the computer they would want it to be the core of their home lab, hearing that it's so stripped down that it's basically just enough to run its own NAS target and would probably need upgrades to host anything else of consequence is not great.
Also the breakaway PCIe covers are kind of a letdown, it's kind of like a hallmark distinction between a "cheap" case and a high-end case. It feels like a penny pinch move which is not what I want to see on the $800 case.
Thanks! This is all great feedback.
100%
Staggering spinup on the newer backplanes is great. My other 45drives units have issues with this and required them sending me a larger PSU to handle the load at boot. They were great though and sent two Corsair 1200w psus for those units.
I have one of these HL units on the way and am excited to built it out and add it to the family.
Thank you for posting this video 🎉. You have a new subscriber. Keep up the great 👍 work..
Love that you went baremetal Ubuntu server on this - I do this at work with most of our production servers (I work at a game dev studio), and it's a joy to manage with Ansible. I've cycled disk arrays and containers through different physical servers many times as we grow, and it's almost trivial to jump hardware this way.
you're very knowledgeable, this was my first time seeing a video of yours, and I had to subscribe . you're not just another shilltuber, you actually know whats going on
Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. I try to make it worth the click!
really love your content keep it up!
Appreciate it!
Looks good, but what I'd really like to see is an HL-6 or HL-8 for 1/2 the price...
HL0 is about my budget
@@tcasex 🤣
Our plan is release HL8 and HL4 in the near future!
@@45Drives - AWESOME! 😃
@@45Driveslet me guess, for $749 and $699 for just the case and backplane respectively?
Happy to another HL15 using a standard Distro with Cockpit/Houston. Mine is currently still running Rocky 8 after a manual reinstall and pulling from the testing repo. It's really a wonderfully built chassis, and I'm hoping most of this is just growing pains.
Looking forward to hearing how your Houston experience is, I've grown fond of Cockpit over the last few weeks.
Wow great video!
I'm glad some people are finding this appealing, but personally I'm not seeing it. For the cost there seems to have been a significant amount of corner-cutting and compromises. For $2000 I'm pretty confident I could put together a setup that suits my needs significantly better than this would. It really kind of seems like the customer base they're looking for might not exist in high numbers; they'd want to target people who want to host a homelab and have the knowledge to do it, aren't price sensitive, and simultaneously don't have enough knowledge/gumption to put together their own setup but are able to deal with the software issues. idk man.
Why would anyone go with this kind of solution when there are so many 4U chassis (with hot swap bays) available?
Thank you for including some data on power consumption.
Loved the video. i need to save save save to get this.
Thanks for the rundown, mine ships next week and found this rocon super helpful!
Have fun!
I'm curious how Gentle Typhoon fans would do noise-wise in this chassis. I currently use Dell R530 8 bay servers for my TrueNAS storage back end and they're pretty quiet. Noise would be my biggest concern with this chassis. 120mm fans are a very good start though! Congrats on 45 drives bringing a reasonably priced chassis in here and giving us the option of barebones for those who might want to customize this! This is a wonderful looking start! Going to see how other people do with quieting it down before I jump at this point though.
I've been wanting something like this for years and even though it's pricy I'm going to grab the chassis next year when I get around to rebuilding my NAS. I know people have been complaining about the price but when you compare features even the fully built system is comparable to anything else you can buy new though I personally think the motherboard + CPU combo is underwhelming (but that's also true for just about every other off the shelf storage option). Yes you can DIY and spend a lot less money and while I'd usually go that route (my current NAS cost me all of $400 before drives) having a solid steel case, more than 12 drives and not needing caddies hits pretty much all my pain points with less expensive chassis. Never mind not slicing hands apart by mistake while working inside the thing.
I'm hoping supporting 45drives now will open up cheaper options for homelabbers in the future and honestly it's nice to buy something nice for my little setup every once in a while. I do hope they can bring the production costs down a bit with future iterations though.
LGA3647 CPUs are dirt cheap, so it's not an issue to upgrade the CPU, to the point of getting enough (decent) thermal compound to cover Socket P CPU may end up costing more than the chip itself. Even low-tier Silvers are really decent CPUs already, 4209T being holy grail due to 70W TDP, and $90 pricetag.
It's really hard to not like the design... but in the end, it's a device. You can argue all you want, but $800 is way too much for empty chassis on a single backplane. You can buy 16-bay cage-only chassis, like Rosewill's RSV-L4500U (which supports SSI-EEB, while this does not) for quarter of that price, or CHENBRO RM31616 for $450. For tower system equivalents... please.
Also staggered spinup can be triggered from the SAS controller's firmware side, regardless of backplane, or lack of it. It's a standard ACPI feature.
It's nice looking, and looks well built, but it's really not worth the money they're asking for it.
I'd like to see an HL30 or HL45. If I'm already spending the money for the HL15, I'd rather pay extra and have future expandability. It also lets you get higher storage amounts while using whatever size drives you come across for a good price.
This. 4u/24-bay is the minimum bar (and common in the used market). 30/45 drives would justify the price.
Interesting. I dunno, I still prefer old enterprise gear from like Dell. I'm sticking with my nx3230 for now for my nas. Glad to see more options popping up, and keeps competition out there.
This would be my dream HL NAS server. For now I'll stick with my 20TB self-built NAS server. Do you know if 45Drives are releasing a mini version of HL15?
I'm hoping that this convinces other manufacturers to create cases that are more home lab focused. Like Gearboxworks says i'd probably be down for a smaller case that supported 6 or 8 drives ad about half the price. being in over $900 for a case, backplane, PSU and cables is a bit much. Especially when the case is basically just a rackmount case turned on its side. I've got a 12-bay Dell R510 behind me across the room that's so quiet I can't even hear it running at the moment. And when you compare the initial costs for the HL-15 against what you can get a fully kitted out piece of second hand enterprise gear for it just makes very little sense. There are just so many more cost efficient options out there. The server I just build with second hand parts in a Fractal Node 304, has twice the physical cores, higher clock, hyper threading, 4x the amount of ram that thing arrived with, and 6x 10tb drives, 850watt PSU and I'm in under $1000 including drives. Granted I can't physically fit any more drives in but if I did all i'd need is a disk shelf and a HBA. I just don't know. I guess i'm must too value conscious to see any value in the HL15.
I wonder how this compared pricewise to running TrueNAS in a Fractal Define XL case, which is where mine is now. I’ll have to go back through my receipts for a total.
It did take buying mounts and some ingenuity to get 14 drives mounted in that case, though Linus Tech Tips got 20 drives installed!
Nice video. I works like to see a NAS appliance that supported zfs pools natively.I don’t know of any exist, though.
Kudos to 45Drives for using Supermicro boards! FWIW, I'm using Proxmox and installed Samba/NFS and it's super simple to add a share/mount as you just have to edit one file. Using ZFS and I have CIFS shares with auto-snapshots, recycle bin and previous versions via snapshots. No TrueNAS/Cockpit needed 🙂
Thanks for the tips! I will probably give bare metal a shot, no UI! Maybe even ansible to configure it all!
Nice in-depth video about the HL15 Tim, I do however have some questions about the connections on the backplane. How is it connected to the PSU? What connectors is used? What connections is used for the SATA/SAS Connections? Could I buy an LSi 16i, or two LSi 8i's and use this backplane?
This is really nice. I bought a used SuperMicro chassis (4U 36-drive), and have run Ubuntu Server with ZFS "bare metal" for three years, and it takes a bit of tinkering to get set up the first time. But now I know how to do it (documentation is king), and I'm not so afraid of doing it again.
Same, though went with a 24 bay. Hot swapping drives is a godsend. Not using a Super micro motherboard though and changed out the stock fans and PSU to quieter ones.
Aside the typical drive failure after some time (which prompts me to upgrade my array sizes) haven't had any major problems with it for the last 4 years.
eBay did me well with that case :)
@@KeyJayHD yeah, I also replaced the internal fans with three 120mm Noctua industrial fans, and got a pair of slightly weaker (2x1280W) SuperQuiet PSUs
If you're going the bare metal CLI route, you can always install the Remote SSH extension in VS Code, then SSH-connect to your server via VS Code. That makes managing config files much more convenient.
Great idea!
Nice!
Best technical review so far! It should be mentioned, although designed it to fit a Network sized rack (typically 20” depth), the rail kit offered has a minimum depth of 24”. Also, I’m not sure I understand the touted Steel Case as positive; it’s heavier, prone to corrosion, and is the cheapest material (outside of plastics) to use. They couldn’t even be bothered with proper I/O plates, as you mentioned. Aluminum would be a premium.
The price is egregious and a terrible value-prop IMO (and 99% of Reddit). I’d wager a 75-80% profit margin on these units.
I would love these features in a smaller form factor (8 drive or 16 drive version). I really like how they went caddyless for drives loading into the backplane.
Self-Hosted Podcast had an episode recently with a few members of the 45Drives team. They said they are planning just that. A couple smaller count storage servers, and a "thin client" meant to add more compute to your cluster.
It's very appealing for a homelab. I'm sure as homelabs get more attention eventually one of the bigger case manufacturers will take notice and start mass producing cases like this that are a lot more affordable.
I definitely welcome the competition in this niche we are in! Hopefully self-hosting and data freedom won't be so niche in the future!
I have a Sliger CX4712 that I bought right before this wan announced. It’s about half the price but that backplane would have been really nice! The CX is just passthrough and talk about a cabling mess!
Oh man, I wish they came out with this before I built out my NAS box with desktop hardware. Right now I'm confined to 8 disks and if I need to grow I need to replace the ones that I already have ... and then spend the week syncing out my data.
Great job as always! I already run a new Supermicro CSE-846 chassis I got on eBay with my own hardware and 3d printed fan wall, but if I have another need for another system in the future this will be the case. It does need RGB though... :)
Hoping for a case built for rack mounted water cooling to be honest. If I were to build such a case I would actually have the air intake be bottom chamber that's pulls air through a air intake in front of the case, then I would radiators pull air up/ vertically from the air intake chamber to blow it out of the rear of the case. You would be able to fit triple 360mm radiators that way without sandwiching them.
I’m extremely interested in 45drives Proxinator models but it seems its out of reach for my home lab setup. Could this be a good proxmox server instead of a storage server?
If you go for the newer SM motherboards x12/h12 and up you can flash the bios through ipmi without license however if you want to mount an iso over remote console then you will need the SM ipmi license
I'm not sure I see the value proposition here. For the sake of comparison, a new Supermicro CSE-846A-R900B chassis is about $1200. That gives 24 bays rather than 15 in the same 4U footprint, still with the same sort of direct-attached backplane (no SAS expanders here). Dual 900-watt PSUs, which are also hot-swappable. Nearly double the weight means the SM unit will be a pain to move around, but also suggests it will be much more sturdy. For 30% more money (new, to keep the comparison fair), 60% more drives, and more than double the power, in the same 4U space.
And, of course, Supermicro gear is widely available used at a considerable discount, their chassis are readily serviceable, parts and accessories are available if needed. So while this is a nice-looking chassis, I guess I just don't see the the benefit. Too few drives, too much space, too much money.
I just built one myself this year using Asrock Rack AM4 m-atx mobo, Zen3 5700X, full Noctua cooled, 12x 16TB HDD in a custom 5U short depth casing, 2U delta redundant PSU, 128GB ECC, Nvidia P4, running TN scale with access for storage server and some other applications and plugins. Running as fast as a torpedo, rock stable and so much affordable for the performance you get.
What was TVs final price tag? I love it
I have to agree with a lot of the comments. A little pricey for me, but it’s a nice little chassis and a good offering for someone who wants to spend the money.
For me, used enterprise gear fits my budget just fine.
Looks really nice, but that option with MB included doesn't look that appealing to me. 4y old CPU and motherboard are lot less efficient that more current HW (my small homelab with NAS, 2x 18TB HDD, NUC 13 pro, switch and 2x router consumes 75W when idle).. as someone from Europe where electricity is currently quite expensive that option is not viable
But ignoring the MB + CPU choice. This looks like a nice case that I will most likely consider when I outgrow my current NAS in a few years
This is the way
Hoping they bring us a 30 drive version
There’s an HL15 in my future. It would be an instant purchase if I didn’t already have a heavily modded Silverstone RM400 including two Icy Dock FlexCages, and loaded with Noctua fans.
Thanks for the awesome review. Now I know 100% that the 6 core CPU is more than enough for a dedicated storage server.
Nice! It should also run some containers and even a few VMs too, but anything outside of that might be pushing it for this CPU
@@TechnoTim I have other machines for that, this is just for storage and storage related services, iSCSI, S3, ceph mirror. Maybe Jellyfin with a transcoding GPU, but I can't imagine much more.
thanks Techno Tim (no-hat version 2), a great breakdown and I'm still on the fence as well after your presentation. Is it all extra$$$ for naming rights???
wow. LOTS of info! Thank you!
You are so welcome!
i would just like to see a smaller one with less hdd slots, like I dont see myself using more then 8, so a 1u or 2u would be amazing to see.
I've been looking to upgrade my homelab storage and just getting the CPU/memory/motherboard with integrated 10G NIC and 3x PCIe x8 is ~$800. Add a case, nvme, PSU, and the backplane and it starts to seem reasonable. I wish they went with an active cooler, low noise fans, and a choice of a CPU with better VM capabilities.
I agree on the fans decision. 45drives asked Reddit and my response was heavily upvoted, and it included a “no fan option” in favor of sourcing our own Noctua fans.
Yes, I can source everything, but I'd rather not. I really like the idea of buying it pre built like that. But, I would have to change enough things that it wouldn't really be worth it to buy pre built.
About rivets, get a pop rivet gun. You will need a drill the size of them and the rivets come in different sizes. Do a search for pop rivets and pop rivet guns. Harbor Freight (of all places) probably sells them and the rivets but search around and see what you can find. I would not use rivets either. They were most likely cheaper than screws and that is why many cases have them. Just make sure not to leave any metal left over from any drilling in the case. That of course could cause a short and damage things. It would also be the start of an unhappy day for you when you realize all of those expensive parts may have been ruined.
Unraid can do most if not all of what you want. It even has ZFS now.
Are they shipping to the europe?
What cable option did it come with? There's so many options for the HBA cables and idk what to choose!
If you are getting the backplane only, you probably don't want the cables I have because they are half SAS and half SATA. This really depends on your HBA! I would ask in their forums to be sure! They are super responsive!
@@TechnoTim Thanks for the reply! I will buy the HBAs after I get the chassis so just looking to see what the best cable types would be to get, what did you end up getting?
Sounds like an ad, looks like an ad. Hell, it even smells like an ad, however that works. Talking points straight from the company. 😮
If it has homelab in the name, you got Tim's attention
When I heard about the HL15 I was pretty excited as I can't justify allocating the funds for a 45d chassis. However, I feel like while the price is obviously far more approachable than the 45d chassis, it's a bit on the boutique/high side of spending for a typical homelabber.
There are a handful of compute chassis from any of the mainstream providers that you could pick up and populate with the same amount of drives and more compute for half the cost.
I really like the aesthetic but I'm hoping 45hl brings something a bit more tangible to market.
My comments were obviously premature based on the end of this video :D
nice... but when we get a 30 bay server? :p
Needs a Locking cover and needs to be a bit longer so a large video card can fit. Then you can build a large capacity workstation that is Bullet proof with strong steel case. There is a Niche. It can replace the Fractal Define R5 and R7XL.
Are there any dust filters ?
There aren't unfortunately! I thought about how I could rig some up in this video but ran out of ideas in time to film this! Let me know if you think of anything!
since unraid has a max of 30 drives I was hoping they would release a 30 drive version. I know they make a 30 drive case but something cheaper would be nice
Slightly disappointing that they don't have all 15 drives available through miniSAS from the backplane, so you could use a single adapter card to keep things better organized, but still looks good.
Can the front face plate be readily removed/replaced with a custom print/skinned one, similar to their other machines? There's an awful lot of screws there, so seeing it bared would be interesting and useful to see/know.
I read in the forums that if you bring your own HBA, it can support all SAS. I also read in the forums that the faceplate can be removed and they are thinking about customization options.
@@TechnoTim Oh very nice then! Thanks for the heads up.
Agreed on both fronts. I dislike the faceplate design. Just give us the 45drives Storinator color selector in addition to the current two brand design options. My whole rack system is solid black with the exception of Unifi aluminum.
Phew that thumbnail is pretty!!
Thank you! I was up really late perfecting it!
Rocky is probably your best bet if you want to run Cockpit. I don't know why 45 Drives is taking on the monumental task of forking Cockpit for their Houston software. I'd just go bare metal.
What length GPU and PSU can it accommodate?
This is an important question, and I hope it gets answered. I have a particularly large spare video card I'm using in one of my servers, and being able to consolidate into a single unit would be quite nice.
Can someone help me pick out a case for building a GPU cluster? Thinking of building a cluster of 4060ti 16gb cards. Would like to make it expandedable. No idea whare to start in terms of rack mounring these
@@_-Karl-_ thank you!
Cool case but it's definitely not worth the asking price without any long term support or some sort of marketplace for spare parts. Jason from byte my bits had his 45 drive backplane die on him, rendering half of his drives useless and he had to resort to some jank set up to get his server up and running.
You were not paid but you were given a gree hl15?
Очень ждал этот корпус, но когда увидел прайс в 800уе офигел (корпус + бэкплейн). За корпус с не очень удачным треем для дисков, нонейм вентилями и простеньким бекплейном ( по факту, для хотсвапа и спин апа нужно выломать 11 пин в коннекторе питания (покупаете прямые коннекторы и пинык ним и 11 пин выламываете - всё у вас хотсвап и спин ап на любой нормальной мамке или hba будет работать)).
It's a tough sell as I imagine we're all more than comfortable buying used enterprise gear off ebay. While not as power efficient as brand new stuff my Dell R720XD is only 50% more power and was 1/10th the cost, with more memory supported.
A used R740XD is already cheaper than this and will blow the snot out of the HL15 in capabilities. So while I agree that it's cool a company is recognising the homelab community, it's also kind of a misplaced product. For me a factor in home labbing is being able to play with 'cool' enterprise gear, even if it is older stuff.
You weren't interested in disk throughput in any config?
I tested the drives individually and even in ZFS but I didn't include it because 1) I only had 6 disks 2) it is highly dependent on the disks you have. 3) video was getting really long! 😅 Unfortunately I didn't have 15 of the same disks to spare and I pulled these 6 from a working system!
@@TechnoTim Fair enough. I would have appreciated even a 5s clip of "No, the drives won't max out 10g, but the CPU will." Would have felt more genuine to me. But I get that time and hardware constraints are very real.
@@minifig404there’s a 45drives video with the founder/owner talking about saturation.
@9:12 You could just shout at your JBOD and tell it to behave (like Brendan Gregg...)
That's a very good system to stay all life on a shelf. LOL 2K for a NAS with performance and capability of the same one from 500 Euro.
Finally got the iMac on Ubuntu I seeeeee
Lots of complaints about the cost. No doubt it’s more expensive than what most home labbers, including myself, are looking to spend. I’m wondering if it’s too expensive for what it is, or if it’s that it’s more than what people are looking for?
There are data hoarders (no disrespect intended) who want every drive bay that they can lay their hands on. But from what I’ve observed in various forums, people are usually looking for an eight bay chassis at most.
What other options are out there that are rack mount, and have as many hot swap 3.5” hard drives bays, other than used servers?
800.- is really a crazy price !
I think the good price is 250.-
I have a Fractal Design box with +15 Drives for 150.-
I can get a 12x3.5" bay R730 with 256GB memory and slap TrueNAS on it for like half that...
I mean if money was no object I'd get it...but yeah...it's definately cool.
Where do they sell this? The Dell US website only shows an R740 server with 8 x 3.5'' and it's $2500 with 8GB DDR4
where do you get these prices? i'd like to see the official dell pricing for this. maybe on ebay, but here we are talking about new systems not used.
@@giornikitop5373 Most of people saying $800 is overpriced are comparing this to used stuff on eBay or large full tower cases that need 30 minutes of cable management when full of drives.
I will agree that the $2,000 full unit doesn’t really make sense. For most home lab items it needs a lot more CPU grunt.
While i think this thing is super cool it for sure missed the price point like crazy. I signed up for updates and was very excited but $800 is way to much. I could see why they did it. To manage invetory and to get the whales. Servercase as more bays and hot swap for half the price.
Maybe it's because I work in a dc but, dunno why you wouldn't just buy a 2u server... Not having hotswap bays is a big -1. Also you can get topless 2.5 and 3.5 sleds
Tooless.
This'll be nice 2 generations from now when it's $50-$250 on ebay or your favorite reseller
Fractal Meshify 2 XL (for a quarter of the price) over this all day. What were they thinking? They completely missed the mark on this.
you completely missed the whole point of the video. meshify is just a pc case while this is a case specific for a storage system, with backplanes, caddy-less cage for hot-swapping drives etc. yes, it's expensive but try install and manage 15 3.5" drives in the meshify and see what happens.
@@giornikitop5373 I've been running 16 drives in my Meshify 2 XL for a few years and it has been great. I'm not sure why you would imply that it couldn't handle it. You can fit 20 drives in the Meshify! I stand by my original statement thanks.
@@giornikitop5373 I have done the large PC case lots of hard drives thing before. They are great if your time costs nothing. 10 to 15 minutes just dealing with cabling when you pull a drive. Pulling all the drives and redoing the cables is usually the quicker and easier way to deal with a dead drive.
I would've bought it, but with import fees, taxes and whatnot, it'd end up at at least 1050 USD for the cheapest option.
No need to bash rivets. They are solid performers and easy to replace.
Thank you! Good point, it's just that I don't have the tooling or the know how!
For me, the price is a real showstoper
Where's the HL60??
Looking forwad to getting my HL15. According to the last email it should ship around DEC 18th. Still trying to figure out if I'll keep using proxmox or do something different.
Honestly, $27 for a 2000 system to get the full remote management suite is not that bad. WAYY!! better than what dell and HP charge for their licenses. Its actually a reasonable price for a homelab user.
The thing is that most homelabbers like to build stuff anyway so I'm not sure if this is going to be a fruitful market for 45 drives.
However there might be some rich dudes or small businesses that might consider this product appropriate.
799USD i think ill pass and stick with my 450NZD case.
Comparing the HL15 to the 450 is like comparing BMW M3 to a Honda S2000-and that’s being generous. Apples and oranges. The HL15 is a flexible and robust platform that allows you to scale up your homelab whenever you want.
450NZD case does what i need, allows me to upgrade how it need and i have it racked up. im talking about just case it self no hardware. @@abb0tt
Be good if I could buy it, it not on the website. The AV15 is. Not the HL15. I could go for 2 of them.
its ok but I would like to see a hl3
Ah yes, the 45HomeLab Half Life 15
2k$ without HHD?
Power switch is just 'B' without the 'RG'
too rich for my blood
Pricing is WAY out of line on this one. sure it looks pretty but that price, not counting shipping and tax? No way in hell, better options out there for that level of cash. (For case and plane alone, built server prices are always overdone for homelab use)
EDITED:
Since someone keeps deleting my posts, here's to you mister searched around the world for years... They even deleted the 4th comment that was also talking about how over priced this is, someone is really trying to push a narrative here....
For an actual homelab? Too easy.
Rosewill has a 15 bay internal without a backplane for $220 on amazon if you buy direct or $137 if you buy from another vendor. And it fits a full proper EATX board.
Is that backplane that only does 8 drives at SAS and the rest at SATA really worth $663 to your home lab? Does that bring you $663 worth of value? No, it doesn't. For a home lab you can easily do better and just get breakout cables and daisy chain 2 legs off your PSU for like $40-$50 bucks, then put that other $600+ into something that actually brings value to your lab.
Oh you say, you want to cry about not having the back plane? OK, too easy.
Silverstone RM43-320RS. It's a 4U case, it's got 20, not 15, 20 HDD bays, oh yea and they are front access hot swap trays, so you don't have to pull your server every time you want to swap a drive. The back plane on this one runs all 20 drives at SAS speeds if you so choose, can't say that about that overpriced piece of junk. And it has dedicated SSD trays that don't block the fans, can't say that here. And it has front panel IO, the HL15 does not. And it has a front optical drive slot, which can be useful, or you can replace it with a hot swap 2.5" drive bay, also useful. And this one fits and EATX as well. Plus it includes the rack rail kit in that price, HL15 does not. Pus being a silverstone it's got great build quality, hence why I've been slowly rotating out all my rosewill cases for silverstone cases. And how much for all this goodness? $830 with free shipping. Remember, your precious HL15 costs $800
Next time you claim you've searched all around the globe for something for years I would suggest spending like 45 seconds on google, will help to keep you from looking like a complete .... chose your own word here
I'd love to see a BOM at MSRP for each item to see how much they mark it up.
Paid 3k in 2020 for a QNAP-h1288x, which has similar specs but much worse build quality and is way less expandable.
You’re dreaming. Show us “better options out there for that level of cash”. Trust me I have looked across the globe for years, and you will not be able to assemble this type of configuration on such a flexible platform for less. I have translated way too many obscure manufacturers websites touting backplane chassis of 12-16 drive bays. Please prove me wrong, otherwise you’re flinging B.S.
@chomp7927 You’re comparing an $800 case with an $800 case…so pricing is not “WAY out of line” after all? 🤦♂️ I’ve owned a SilverStone case for 5 years, and very familiar with the rm43.
@@abb0tt I gave you two options that prove you wrong, you conveniently ignore the $663 difference first of all, then you ignore ALL of the tons of things I just mentioned that the HL15 does not have that prove this is just way over priced and not a good value. Not that I ever expected you to be smart or honest in your replies at all considering you opened with your multi year search around the globe BS
Interesting Hardware, but the Noise is a bit much for a homelab. They should have used noctuas
This. One of the few great points someone has made in critiquing the HL15. 👍
If the drives don't exactly read & write 24/7 you can surely get away with putting all those fans to low speed.
Good call!
For $800 I am not interested.
Kitchen rack on wheels -$50
5-bay HDD cages(amazon) $40 x4
Zip ties (small and long) $15
HBA LSI 9300 16i $100 x2 (IT mode)