This is Doug from 45 Drives. Great video Jeff, nice objective overview of the HL15. I was thrilled to see so many comments as well. Given the work that Jeff put into the video, and the number of thoughtful comments, I thought I’d add a reply, and hopefully add to the discussion. Overall, the comments affirm our view of the home lab market as a group of highly competent and knowledgeable people who share a love of computing, but have very diverse views and approaches. We are in this market because so many people (including our own staff) told us they love our our enterprise products and would like to own something similar. But our enterprise products are too big, too loud, too expensive, etc. for their homelab. So we set out to create choices that work for this specific group of people. The HL15 is product number one. We did NOT intend to try lure anyone who gets joy out of brewing up their own storage machines from scratch. I’ve scratch built systems at home in the past, and understand its rewards. It can be cheaper, its fun, and its your own creation. Nor do we wish to compete with those who recycle retired enterprise gear, as one can get some awesome bargains on cool stuff. Nor did we intend to compete with purpose built home storage appliances like synology boxes. They are great for people who just want to store stuff on their network, at ordinary speed, and they do so at a price point. Rather we tried to create the following: - a chassis that is built like a tank, convenient, toolless, caddie-less, accessible for repair / upgrade / mods, built to last and to look good - our enterprise direct wired architecture, that provides unobstructed lanes from each drive to the motherboard, resulting in simplicity, reliability, and blazing speed through parallelism; - a full build option that is capable of performance that saturates both 10Gb connections simultaneously, preloaded with Rocky Enterprise Linux, ZFS orientedsimple to administer through Houston, and having the headroom to host applications like plex server, proxmox, etc. - a community to discuss hardware, self builds, and applications including our staff picks. [btw, we did a really quick video to show a little bit of what the full build can do straight out the box, saturating a 10GB line to a single out of the box windows client, and editing video on Adobe Premiere with performance that looks identical to an internal NVME. Take a peek if you are interested, th-cam.com/video/illmZIBWozk/w-d-xo.html ] The HL15 does what we intended, and at a $2k price point for the full build [about the cost of a macbook pro] we think it is premium but offers great value. This is a small niche, and in fact, we figured if we sold 200 units over the next year, we’d be be ok. In other words, keep your expectations low, and you’ll never be disappointed :). But we sold that in the first few days of preselling, so its telling us that we’ve hit our mark. So its full speed ahead on our 45 Homelab roadmap, which we look forward to sharing soon. And I’m hoping Jeff will find some time to talk about it in the near future, as he’s been a big influence in shaping our thoughts and direction.
Small nitpick, it's "saturating a 10Gb line", not 10GB. I was highly surprised about ~100Gb performance but it was just a typo, which makes more sense :D
Great to hear that the product is successful as I'd love to see more premium offerings from 45Homelab -- in particular a 1 or 2U compute-focused chassis to pair with this storage-focused one.
As far as a homelab for training, I've taken college classes that are more expensive and teach you less than buying a piece of equipment like this that you will be able to use for a longer time period. I remember college text books costing multiple 100s of dollars, and that was a little while ago now. I might just build my own thing, but it seems like a pretty good option for some.
If they had a 30 drive version for like 1000 dollars I would jump instantly. Thank you 45 Drives for getting in this market finding new servers made for homelab is hard enough already. Norco 24 bay and alot of the supermicros are impossible to buy these days
This. It's nowhere near the quality but you can fit 15 drives in a Rosewill rackmount case. A 30 drive model would be something truly unique in the SOHO market. But I'm not sure if 45drives would consider that too close to their enterprise solutions.
I can get a NEW 24 / 36 bay case somewhat easily, both around ($~500USD). Though the 36 bay is 2 U for compute which brings its own complexity for home lab. Dozens upon dozens of cases will let you cram in 15 drives which makes 15 a weird choice given it's a competitive market with much cheaper options (~$250 USD), charging $800 USD for something with half the capacity of other options that are cheaper, new, is kind of weird. The 45/60 drive units are in a class of their own. A 30 drive with an ability to use an ATX PSU and 120mm fans would be something unique. Seems to be designed to not compete with their other solutions, which makes the market for it quite limited.
Sliger has the CX4712. A 4U 10 drive chassis that you can get with rails for ~$450. The build quality is much better than what I've gotten with Rosewill and Silverstone cases, and it feels like a much more direct comparison to the HL15. Hard to for me justify an extra $400 for 5 more drive bays.
I had been wondering what NAS to get myself, looking at synology systems and various self build options. Sure $2000 is quite a bit of money, but a far smaller and much less capable Synology can cost almost as much. After watching the original videos about this server (yours, techno Tim, Tom Lawrence, etc.) I decided to pre-order the prebuilt system, I trusted your intuition and 45drive to deliver a solid system with a selection of parts picked by experts. I've had an email that all required parts have apparently arrived and now waiting for a build slot.
you can connect the fans to cpu headers on motherboard vs chassis headers for them, that helps, and you set the fan profile, it lowers the noise drasticly
The price is outside of what I can pay, but with that being said it is also about $300 less than I expected it would be. It also sounds like this chassis is really designed to be "home friendly." These were good decisions on the part of 45Drives.
The 20 bay Silverstone RM43-320RS has the same price in the US, (rack rails inclusive). But maybe the mechanical quality is better on the 45Drive case, I haven't had my hands on either of them, so I can't say. Here in Europe the Silverstone is cheaper though. The 45Drive barebone goes way over $1000 when taxes are included. Shipping over the pond adds to the price too.
Price is a bit high, but it's a "premium label". This is what I've been wanting, and I'm going to try to treat myself to this case for christmas. The only real complaint is that it's not very deep so longer video cards might not fit, but given there's no vendor lock-in, that's fine.
This is a fantastic system and does represent a very premium home lab target. However the home lab community had gotten SO used to buying the Rosewill 4U and going FULLY custom or a USED/ Decommissioned 12 bay super micro... or a 8 bay Dell... its a tough sell for some of us. I am VERY glad that they are at least recognizing the home lab market and SOME of us DO have that nice IT/ Sys Admin job and could possibly stomach this kind of investment.
There are 12 bay Supermicro chassis with all 12 caddies, backplane, and dual PSUs for $250 shipped on ebay. I don't see ANY reason to buy this thing. I feel like it is still priced for when Chia destroyed the 3.5" bay market.
Huh, it's weird being on the opposite isle on the price debate. "Investment" is the key term you're overlooking here. Check out the construction, it's built to the same absurd spec the rest of 45Drives's chassis are. Thick steel panels with a chunky mid frame designed to take a beating, and a tightly fit steel drive frame with no plastic interfaces or clips to wear out. Everything is fully serviceable with entirely standard components except for the backplane, but the backplane area is designed to be upgraded yourself to fit future drive standards. Even if 45Drives goes belly up, there's plenty of space to hack together your own backplane. It's an investment grade tool built to last forever. Sure the price is steep, but you're getting something that'll probably outlast your grandkids. It's a refreshing change of pace in an industry where top-end professional hardware is designed to go in the garbage every 5 years, chassis and all.
Actually a pretty good deal. For my main NAS, I paid about $500 for a really solid server board, $200 for a used Xeon. $200 for a swack of ECC, then $300 for a nice rack case and another $300 for all the hot swap HDD bays... power supply and 2 x LSI HBA... several more accessories and rack rails... blah blah blah etc. Lol, I easily spent $2000 on it and it took a couple weeks to gather all the parts. I did build it to be dead silent though, and it really is very quiet. I would totally go for the 45 drives pre-built if I just wanted a turn key system.
Don't get me wrong, I love your channel, and out of that love I think I should say that if you received flights and dinners from an organization, you probably shouldn't say, "no money changed hands." Sticking with something like, "they have no input or editorial control over this video" will get you everything you need without muddying the water. Keep doing what you're doing!
@@CraftComputing No, just “gifted” a bunch of expensive assets (hardware, travel, etc.) in which you’re able help fuel your YT profit streams. It’s like being gifted a Hotel and then saying no money changed hands although retain all the revenue from guest stays. Nothing wrong with freebies but I agree with OP; it’s a bit disingenuous to say “no money changed hands”.
@Max-jv3yg I have nearly a dozen storage servers. Getting another for review doesn't benefit me in any way. I removed a 12-bay server from my rack to make room for this one today.
'Gifted' a bunch of assets was my point. As a hardware reviewer, if I have 30 graphics cards on the shelf, does one more graphics card matter? Is that going to sway my opinion? Review items represent work to be performed, and often have costs associated with reviewing them. I provide my disclosures so you have the full story of my relationships with any company. But you are claiming 'gifts and travel' inherently sway my opinions, and that's just patently not true.
I'm usually the "that's too expensive" guy (much to Jeff's regular annoyance), but $800 for a chassis and back plane built to "investment spec" (sturdy, dense, and serviceable enough to potentially last 40+ years), it's hard to argue with the price.
That's an interesting machine. I recently rebuilt my rackmount NAS box, going from the Chenbro NR12000 chassis (I was inspired to buy one from one of your previous videos) to a Rosewill 4U 12 bay hot swap box (although I kept the old motherboard, RAM, and drives). That HL15 definitely looks like a great starting place for a brand new build in it's barebone config, although I really wanted hot swap stuff. I find pulling the server out of the rack to change out drives is quite aggravating. I'm incrementing my way up to something more capable and energy efficient, but budget is as budget must! Thanks for the review video!
Was hoping for more of a overview of the base option... what connectors do you need for backplane, do you need specific hba, what powers the backplance( sata/molex/pcie), etc?
Same, that's why I came to this video. What I do know is the 4 backplanes are SFF 8643 Mini-SAS-HD. The middle option let's you choose what you want the other end to be. There are multiple options. What I can't seem to find is information like drive compatability (sas, sata, dual?), MoBo compatability (ATX, EATX?). I know its probably a given that all are supported but for $900 I would like to know ahead of time.
@@CraftComputing thank you! I have been looking all over their website and forum. Finally found the drive info in a random forum post. Are the bays Hot Swappable?
I presume it’s an atx form factor. I need a chassis for a NAS build I am making for remote backup using an old am4 motherboard and cpu and this looks perfect
That would have been an ideal price for my build. I found that the cost in drives is higher than the core components, quite significantly. We sell Nimble, and a basic Nimble is 40k or something, and while not directly comparable, even most enterprise NAS base units hover around 3-5k with nothing in them.
Great video, makes me think of picking one up. Especially since it's made in Canada! 6:35 - I thought I was going crazy thinking someone was banging on my wall, but I think you have sound errant sounds in the video scattered throughout, seems to be caused by touching the chassis
5:38 What supermicro where you talking about? I listened to it a few times and I swear it's "supermicro 948 chassis" but I cannot find that chassis. Thanks!
Man I really see both sides on that price debate. Personally I'm interested but probably won't need until my current hardware bites the dust. Using a bunch of Synology Diskstations simply for easy of use. Love seeing this build it yourself. For those that don't want used, second hand, or eBay "it may work for awhile" equipment in our homelabs
Very interesting. I built my server a year ago so I'm good for now...but if/when I need more storage this is a compelling option because I could transplant my existing ATX hardware into it and then add more drives.
OnBoard SAS controller. The backplane has 4x SFF 8643 ports. The Sm Motherboard has a pair of 8083 and 8643 each. Direct-connect to each SAS port on the backplane.
Assuming that it's to sata hdd's. It would be interesting to see how...45 ssd's could be connected and do. Kinda neet. I would love to see Truenas run one of those...ya know. FOR SCIENCE!!! Lol
@@CraftComputing No, I don't know when any events like that take place, usually. I don't use social media much at all. I'm subscribed to your channel on Floatplane, though. I just thought it was cool since I drive by 45 Drives daily. Do you remember that small park at the traffic light on the opposite corner of 45 Drives? I live on that side street there that ends at the park. I'm only a block or so up the hill from there. Did you do any sight seeing while you were here? The Cabot Trail is an amazing drive over multiple mountains, often right on the edge of the water. My wife and I love it here.
Honestly that fan noise is in a great state and I'm glad they listened to the community feedback on that. Sure you might not want to have that directly on your desk, but you also don't want 15 mechanical HDDs click-clacking away on your desk either, and since they're not exceeding that noise floor by any significant degree I think that's totally fair. Just putting something between you and the server will already make it much more quiet than any of the servers I have at home... My 1U Asrock server has fans that go up to 23k RPM. You can hear them throughout my entire apartment if they're at maximum tilt (tho luckily Asrock boards allow manual fan control, so they usually only run at 5k RPM and are only audible when I'm in the same room or immediately in front of the door to the room they're in.
Nice! Will you do a follow up on how to build it with your own ATX MB and PSU? What connectors are there to the backplane for example? Also, you mention Supermicro 948, what chassis is that? I can’t find any info on it.
Even the Rosewill 4u ATX cases are fetching over $200 these days, and this HL15 solves serious problems that an enthusiast will have connecting and running those drives. Not to mention this is way, way easier to work on. If it'd been available when I built my NAS, I would have seriously considered it. As it is, it's an upgrade path for sure. Next time I do a hardware refresh on my NAS, I'll seriously consider making the jump.
I'm still watching this, but at 2/3 through you never mentioned depth. Can you tell me what the depth of this is? Some of us have very short depth racks at home, hidden in the laundry room for example. ;-)
I'd be curious to see how an NFA12x25 swap would go given their incredible sound profile. Obviously not server fans but I've been running 6 of them 24/7 for several years. Curious to see temps with that.
Noctua, if I recall correctly, has a continuous operation variant of those fans for industrial uses. These could drop a bit of sound, but the major culprit would still be the 15 spinning rust hard drives, enterprise or not, once all of them get loaded with IOPS...
I would be very interested to see a video which covers the various considerations for building a NAS from the ground up. So for example - imagine if you were building a NAS that can work as a Plex / Media server, what sort of Network equipment you will need for various setup (stream HD / 4K / 8K from Nas to Smart TV via LAN), what sort of drives / storage you should consider for things like reliability / read speed, what sort of ethernet ports / cables you should use / look for (i.e what sort of transfer speeds you should be looking for), any considerations that are relevant for things like multiple streams (i.e streaming media to multiple devices), any considerations for things like transcoding. What sort of RAM / CPU you look for, and how RAM / CPU are relevant when it comes to building a NAS (i.e in what scenarios are these the bottlenecks / what hardware you should get for various requirements). In addition to the above - I would be very interested to hear any of your added points (in case I have blindspots for example)
Looking for case only interesting alternative is Inner tech 4U-4416. Gives you 16 hot swap bays in 4U format at little more than 1/2 the price (at least in Europe).
i would like to have seen what kinda of system you can build in it and what kinda power draw and performance you can get. i think this could be a lot better then nas since they only go up to 10 bays. i would also like to see them do it in 30 drives, i like the set up these better since they hard drive rest on the back pain so air can get pass them better
I wish we could get a collab from you, Wendel, Jeff, And Tom talking about that visit and any exciting things you guys learned or found out. Tech nerd heaven brotha. Lol
The price is painful, but it's really nice to see a good tower case option for mass storage. I don't have the space to put a rack in my house, so towers are really my only option.
A nice box, although I'm kind of hoping that Raspberry Pi 'toy' they were playing with comes through. 15 spinning drives is a bit more than I'd like, several SSD's, now that would be nice. As for your outtro, "Italian flavour", yes here all the time, I married one.
finaly they diside to charge a more resonable price for case from 3000$ to 600 but still 600 is a lot when a normal old style case cost from 20-100 and you can fit 6-8 drive on them , and add other 4 with the 5 in bay
If they made say a HL15-S model that supported 30 drives (or more) and came with the needed cards and cabling to be able to add additional storage (DAS).
@@CraftComputing I was think S for pure storage. As that size and layout is beautiful.
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I picked up that you said Xeon Bronze was more than adequate to drive 10Gb/s. But would it be adequate for upgrades to 25Gb/s links and say 4 NVMe drives (Gen3 x4) which is what I am planning for fast storage that later dribbles out to disk? I was thinking I should bump up to the 4210 but am wondering if that is necessary (or enough) to avoid having the CPU be the bottleneck (non-expert here in any of this). Also wondering how RAM affects that?
My Norco 4224 is not loud but quite noisy and warm/hot despite having spend a lot of time and effort to make it cool and quiet. Having the disks vertical and the backplane at the bottom helps a lot in noise and temps and so far the HL15 is the cheapest homelab friendly of this variant I know of. When noise is a real issue, then $800 or even $2000 is cheap (when you are in an apartment for example). Now with larger drives (18/20Tb being more popular now), 15 drives can get you a long way already, but I think a HL30 would be quite popular. People tend to forget how loud servers are and that not everybody can have a jet engine, sometime you need to pick cool and quiet and be a little expensive.
I really love the concept. But the barebones should be about 200$ cheaper. And I don't expect them to drop to that price ever. Or if they do it will be in maybe 3-4 years. Just so the early adopters don't feel cheated.
The backplane alone is a $350 part if you comparison shop. Is the case a value at $400, no. But, it’s not a high volume chassis and I don’t see how they’d get it below $350 without major compromises, including profit margin. So, my best guess is they could have offered it at $700. Given what’s actually available on the market, I think $800 was the right price.
That's actually pretty reasonable for what you get. Finding a case with a good backplane for that many drives really limits you to rackmount gear, which if you're not into ex enterprise gear means you're looking at old cases with bad cooling if you want enough bays.
Love the case but 90% of the premium they're asking for is because of the cool backplane (and brand recognition). We're really just talking about some bent sheet metal for $800. If the market wasn't flooded with cheap used server gear I'd suck it up and buy it, but for HALF the price I can get and excellent used chassis with rails.
I'm of two minds about the price but I think you nailed that topic Jeff. Supermicro used to make an absolutely wonderful 15-drive chassis that was at least this expensive. This is highly appealing to me, not because I have 15 drives yet, but because I have 9 drives in a Frankenstein configuration of internal and hot-swap add-on cages. It is loud, inconvenient and I can barely keep the thermals in check at 25C ambient with 100% fan speed. I am seriously considering this case for the consolidation alone as there are very few cases that offer such an open philosophy of parts with such flexibility.
I would very much love to own some 45Drives chassis, but the price for new is just far outside my comfortable price point. Definitely desire it though.
I would love to see a 30 and 45 drive bear bones kits. I have overpowered hardware in my 24 bay chassis's but i wish i could combine my 36 drives into one system.
More power to them for designing the thing and asking $800 for the chassis and backplane. The reality is that a sub $200 version will be on ali express in 6 or 8 months. It's a niche market for sure but it's simple enough to build a case like this for under $200.
i see this machine as a great option for a small-medium business (eg media company, Medical office) who has to host their data on prem. $2000 for that machine and that configuration is a great value. I sure hope IX is paying attention as their Mini-XL is around the same price yet you gain far more hardware and capability (in a great case no less!) than their offering.
This would make an ideal replacement for my Unraid server, which is currently down. Don't know who thought it was a good idea to use a USB drive as the boot drive :(
This is cool, i live 3 blocks away, guess it’s time to apply for a job there🤞, Cape Breton Island is very unique compared to mainland Nova Scotia, this is Cape Breton :)
$800 for a 15 drive chassis with backplane is a pretty good deal. I remember loading up 6U+ EMC and Sun storage machines when I used to work for an ISP. I'll let you guess how much those things cost. I'd love to get my hands on one of these. Probably throw some 9th gen Intel desktop hardware I have laying around in it and see what kind of nonsense I can get into.
For work I would be quite happy with a 30 bay version for 2 times the cost of the top end price you quoted. Although I would want redundant power supplies, a higher clocked CPU and lots more RAM.
Pretty sweet! That's beautiful, but in the world where old enterprise gear exists, its hard to even look this way other than if you like the aesthetics. Thanks for another sweet video. Looking at those beautiful R730XDs for 250-300$
Yeah, $800 seems pretty reasonable for what it is _and_ for where it comes from. Personally, I still think I'll be aiming for Fractal XLs as I don't think that I can fit a rack in my apartment. But if I could, I'd certainly consider a barebones.
I ordered one back in October. But the price is way too high indeed. For half of that you can get a 4U InterTech chassis with backplane for 24 drives. I got it because it’s smaller than a 4U chassis length wise and doesn’t require caddies.
I'm interested in the chassis but I haven't seen much about motherboard compatibility. Will this fit something like a Supermicro X10 based dual CPU EATX board?
in Germany I can get 15 hotswappable drives for around 350-400€ ($375-$430) new, so yeah, it's definitely quite expensive for the use case. It's a beautiful case, and seems very well manufactured (it's a protocase, duh), but for $800 I have to say no.
Why only 15 drives though? I can get 15 drives out of a rosewill server chassis for under $400. Sure the build quality probably won't be as good, but it's a server chassis and I only pop open the case once a year if that. More competition in the homelab space is always nice though.
Your the first person I have seen from the 45 Drives Summit to have one of the HL units. I'm sitting here just waiting for my Zimablade to put into production as part of my homelab. I'm so far behind of getting the studio where I want it. ADHD!!!
So excuse my ignorance because I've not had hands on many NAS chassis in my life. But how is this more compelling than say a Silverstone RM43-320-RS or RM22-312
This is Doug from 45 Drives. Great video Jeff, nice objective overview of the HL15. I was thrilled to see so many comments as well. Given the work that Jeff put into the video, and the number of thoughtful comments, I thought I’d add a reply, and hopefully add to the discussion.
Overall, the comments affirm our view of the home lab market as a group of highly competent and knowledgeable people who share a love of computing, but have very diverse views and approaches.
We are in this market because so many people (including our own staff) told us they love our our enterprise products and would like to own something similar. But our enterprise products are too big, too loud, too expensive, etc. for their homelab. So we set out to create choices that work for this specific group of people. The HL15 is product number one.
We did NOT intend to try lure anyone who gets joy out of brewing up their own storage machines from scratch. I’ve scratch built systems at home in the past, and understand its rewards. It can be cheaper, its fun, and its your own creation. Nor do we wish to compete with those who recycle retired enterprise gear, as one can get some awesome bargains on cool stuff. Nor did we intend to compete with purpose built home storage appliances like synology boxes. They are great for people who just want to store stuff on their network, at ordinary speed, and they do so at a price point.
Rather we tried to create the following:
- a chassis that is built like a tank, convenient, toolless, caddie-less, accessible for repair / upgrade / mods, built to last and to look good
- our enterprise direct wired architecture, that provides unobstructed lanes from each drive to the motherboard, resulting in simplicity, reliability, and blazing speed through parallelism;
- a full build option that is capable of performance that saturates both 10Gb connections simultaneously, preloaded with Rocky Enterprise Linux, ZFS orientedsimple to administer through Houston, and having the headroom to host applications like plex server, proxmox, etc.
- a community to discuss hardware, self builds, and applications including our staff picks.
[btw, we did a really quick video to show a little bit of what the full build can do straight out the box, saturating a 10GB line to a single out of the box windows client, and editing video on Adobe Premiere with performance that looks identical to an internal NVME. Take a peek if you are interested, th-cam.com/video/illmZIBWozk/w-d-xo.html ]
The HL15 does what we intended, and at a $2k price point for the full build [about the cost of a macbook pro] we think it is premium but offers great value. This is a small niche, and in fact, we figured if we sold 200 units over the next year, we’d be be ok. In other words, keep your expectations low, and you’ll never be disappointed :). But we sold that in the first few days of preselling, so its telling us that we’ve hit our mark.
So its full speed ahead on our 45 Homelab roadmap, which we look forward to sharing soon. And I’m hoping Jeff will find some time to talk about it in the near future, as he’s been a big influence in shaping our thoughts and direction.
Small nitpick, it's "saturating a 10Gb line", not 10GB. I was highly surprised about ~100Gb performance but it was just a typo, which makes more sense :D
Great to hear that the product is successful as I'd love to see more premium offerings from 45Homelab -- in particular a 1 or 2U compute-focused chassis to pair with this storage-focused one.
Well the price is outside of my realm but i can see that being a very compelling option for some. It looks very well designed.
@pointvector1951 very true. I hadn't considered that. I'll have to rethink my stance
@@wertacusyou have to think more holistically about the synergies this collaborative environment could promote
As far as a homelab for training, I've taken college classes that are more expensive and teach you less than buying a piece of equipment like this that you will be able to use for a longer time period. I remember college text books costing multiple 100s of dollars, and that was a little while ago now. I might just build my own thing, but it seems like a pretty good option for some.
If they had a 30 drive version for like 1000 dollars I would jump instantly. Thank you 45 Drives for getting in this market finding new servers made for homelab is hard enough already. Norco 24 bay and alot of the supermicros are impossible to buy these days
I fully agree.
This. It's nowhere near the quality but you can fit 15 drives in a Rosewill rackmount case. A 30 drive model would be something truly unique in the SOHO market. But I'm not sure if 45drives would consider that too close to their enterprise solutions.
I can get a NEW 24 / 36 bay case somewhat easily, both around ($~500USD). Though the 36 bay is 2 U for compute which brings its own complexity for home lab. Dozens upon dozens of cases will let you cram in 15 drives which makes 15 a weird choice given it's a competitive market with much cheaper options (~$250 USD), charging $800 USD for something with half the capacity of other options that are cheaper, new, is kind of weird. The 45/60 drive units are in a class of their own. A 30 drive with an ability to use an ATX PSU and 120mm fans would be something unique. Seems to be designed to not compete with their other solutions, which makes the market for it quite limited.
45Drives do listen to their customers so maybe they'll do something like that in the future.
Sliger has the CX4712. A 4U 10 drive chassis that you can get with rails for ~$450. The build quality is much better than what I've gotten with Rosewill and Silverstone cases, and it feels like a much more direct comparison to the HL15. Hard to for me justify an extra $400 for 5 more drive bays.
I had been wondering what NAS to get myself, looking at synology systems and various self build options. Sure $2000 is quite a bit of money, but a far smaller and much less capable Synology can cost almost as much. After watching the original videos about this server (yours, techno Tim, Tom Lawrence, etc.) I decided to pre-order the prebuilt system, I trusted your intuition and 45drive to deliver a solid system with a selection of parts picked by experts. I've had an email that all required parts have apparently arrived and now waiting for a build slot.
Just noticed that I had an email from 45drives an hour ago, it is in the production queue! 🥳
@@Jaabaa_Primeupdates?
you can connect the fans to cpu headers on motherboard vs chassis headers for them, that helps, and you set the fan profile, it lowers the noise drasticly
The price is outside of what I can pay, but with that being said it is also about $300 less than I expected it would be.
It also sounds like this chassis is really designed to be "home friendly." These were good decisions on the part of 45Drives.
The 20 bay Silverstone RM43-320RS has the same price in the US, (rack rails inclusive). But maybe the mechanical quality is better on the 45Drive case, I haven't had my hands on either of them, so I can't say. Here in Europe the Silverstone is cheaper though. The 45Drive barebone goes way over $1000 when taxes are included. Shipping over the pond adds to the price too.
That's awesome you went to their warehouse! That's like 3 hours drive from where I grew up. I had no idea they were based out of Nova Scotia!
Price is a bit high, but it's a "premium label". This is what I've been wanting, and I'm going to try to treat myself to this case for christmas.
The only real complaint is that it's not very deep so longer video cards might not fit, but given there's no vendor lock-in, that's fine.
This is a fantastic system and does represent a very premium home lab target. However the home lab community had gotten SO used to buying the Rosewill 4U and going FULLY custom or a USED/ Decommissioned 12 bay super micro... or a 8 bay Dell... its a tough sell for some of us. I am VERY glad that they are at least recognizing the home lab market and SOME of us DO have that nice IT/ Sys Admin job and could possibly stomach this kind of investment.
There are 12 bay Supermicro chassis with all 12 caddies, backplane, and dual PSUs for $250 shipped on ebay. I don't see ANY reason to buy this thing. I feel like it is still priced for when Chia destroyed the 3.5" bay market.
Huh, it's weird being on the opposite isle on the price debate.
"Investment" is the key term you're overlooking here. Check out the construction, it's built to the same absurd spec the rest of 45Drives's chassis are. Thick steel panels with a chunky mid frame designed to take a beating, and a tightly fit steel drive frame with no plastic interfaces or clips to wear out. Everything is fully serviceable with entirely standard components except for the backplane, but the backplane area is designed to be upgraded yourself to fit future drive standards. Even if 45Drives goes belly up, there's plenty of space to hack together your own backplane. It's an investment grade tool built to last forever. Sure the price is steep, but you're getting something that'll probably outlast your grandkids.
It's a refreshing change of pace in an industry where top-end professional hardware is designed to go in the garbage every 5 years, chassis and all.
Actually a pretty good deal. For my main NAS, I paid about $500 for a really solid server board, $200 for a used Xeon. $200 for a swack of ECC, then $300 for a nice rack case and another $300 for all the hot swap HDD bays... power supply and 2 x LSI HBA... several more accessories and rack rails... blah blah blah etc. Lol, I easily spent $2000 on it and it took a couple weeks to gather all the parts. I did build it to be dead silent though, and it really is very quiet. I would totally go for the 45 drives pre-built if I just wanted a turn key system.
Don't get me wrong, I love your channel, and out of that love I think I should say that if you received flights and dinners from an organization, you probably shouldn't say, "no money changed hands." Sticking with something like, "they have no input or editorial control over this video" will get you everything you need without muddying the water.
Keep doing what you're doing!
Yes, because my family eats airline miles.
@@CraftComputing No, just “gifted” a bunch of expensive assets (hardware, travel, etc.) in which you’re able help fuel your YT profit streams. It’s like being gifted a Hotel and then saying no money changed hands although retain all the revenue from guest stays.
Nothing wrong with freebies but I agree with OP; it’s a bit disingenuous to say “no money changed hands”.
@Max-jv3yg I have nearly a dozen storage servers. Getting another for review doesn't benefit me in any way. I removed a 12-bay server from my rack to make room for this one today.
@@CraftComputing Ok? Not sure how that’s relevant but I’m happy for your surplus of storage nodes.
'Gifted' a bunch of assets was my point. As a hardware reviewer, if I have 30 graphics cards on the shelf, does one more graphics card matter? Is that going to sway my opinion? Review items represent work to be performed, and often have costs associated with reviewing them. I provide my disclosures so you have the full story of my relationships with any company. But you are claiming 'gifts and travel' inherently sway my opinions, and that's just patently not true.
Hey! You should do a follow up video using what you put in with the barebone versión
I'm usually the "that's too expensive" guy (much to Jeff's regular annoyance), but $800 for a chassis and back plane built to "investment spec" (sturdy, dense, and serviceable enough to potentially last 40+ years), it's hard to argue with the price.
That's an interesting machine. I recently rebuilt my rackmount NAS box, going from the Chenbro NR12000 chassis (I was inspired to buy one from one of your previous videos) to a Rosewill 4U 12 bay hot swap box (although I kept the old motherboard, RAM, and drives). That HL15 definitely looks like a great starting place for a brand new build in it's barebone config, although I really wanted hot swap stuff. I find pulling the server out of the rack to change out drives is quite aggravating. I'm incrementing my way up to something more capable and energy efficient, but budget is as budget must! Thanks for the review video!
Was hoping for more of a overview of the base option... what connectors do you need for backplane, do you need specific hba, what powers the backplance( sata/molex/pcie), etc?
Same, that's why I came to this video. What I do know is the 4 backplanes are SFF 8643 Mini-SAS-HD. The middle option let's you choose what you want the other end to be. There are multiple options.
What I can't seem to find is information like drive compatability (sas, sata, dual?), MoBo compatability (ATX, EATX?). I know its probably a given that all are supported but for $900 I would like to know ahead of time.
The backplane is Molex powered, and supports either SATA or SAS drives. The case only supports ATX boards. EATX are too large.
@@CraftComputing thank you! I have been looking all over their website and forum. Finally found the drive info in a random forum post. Are the bays Hot Swappable?
@@CraftComputing how many connections? if one of the cables dies, will the full backplane still function? thanks
It seems like an option if you do not have the room for a rack. If you do have a rack it would be cheaper to connect your server to a storage array.
I presume it’s an atx form factor. I need a chassis for a NAS build I am making for remote backup using an old am4 motherboard and cpu and this looks perfect
Yes, ATX form factor.
That would have been an ideal price for my build. I found that the cost in drives is higher than the core components, quite significantly. We sell Nimble, and a basic Nimble is 40k or something, and while not directly comparable, even most enterprise NAS base units hover around 3-5k with nothing in them.
I want to know more about that small SSD box that was at 2:45 in your video. That is something I am very interested in.
This sponsor piece was excellent, Jeff! Loved it! 😂
Your corporate shill personality reminded me of the newspaper editor in Spiderman 😂
LOL, i wrote it thinking about JK Simmons, so thank you!!!!!
Great video, makes me think of picking one up. Especially since it's made in Canada!
6:35 - I thought I was going crazy thinking someone was banging on my wall, but I think you have sound errant sounds in the video scattered throughout, seems to be caused by touching the chassis
He wasn't touching.. he was thumping!.. but yea, open as it was and empty of drives it did have a hollow thunk to the sound.
5:38 What supermicro where you talking about? I listened to it a few times and I swear it's "supermicro 948 chassis" but I cannot find that chassis. Thanks!
The backplane -- is it a SAS expander or just a straight thru back plane? What connectors (and qty) are on the backplane itself?
Direct-connect, SAS, 4x SFF-8643
@@CraftComputing SHIT... time to rethink my HBA plans. Thank you!
looks like someone is going to need a LSI 9400-16i or Lenovo 430-16i
Jeff, what are the PSU requirements for this when sourcing your own PSU?
Very much an enthusiast hobbyist product. You probably shouldn't start here, but it's probably where you should end up.
My DL380p G8: You think that's loud ? Here, hold my beer 😅
Man I really see both sides on that price debate. Personally I'm interested but probably won't need until my current hardware bites the dust. Using a bunch of Synology Diskstations simply for easy of use. Love seeing this build it yourself. For those that don't want used, second hand, or eBay "it may work for awhile" equipment in our homelabs
Very interesting. I built my server a year ago so I'm good for now...but if/when I need more storage this is a compelling option because I could transplant my existing ATX hardware into it and then add more drives.
I'm 10:30 in and still waiting to see how the drives connect to the mobo. On board sas controller? I'm interested.
OnBoard SAS controller. The backplane has 4x SFF 8643 ports. The Sm Motherboard has a pair of 8083 and 8643 each. Direct-connect to each SAS port on the backplane.
Assuming that it's to sata hdd's. It would be interesting to see how...45 ssd's could be connected and do. Kinda neet. I would love to see Truenas run one of those...ya know. FOR SCIENCE!!! Lol
I live almost directly across the street from 45 Drives in Sydney, Nova Scotia
Sydney was beautiful! Did you make it to the creator meetup?
@@CraftComputing No, I don't know when any events like that take place, usually. I don't use social media much at all. I'm subscribed to your channel on Floatplane, though. I just thought it was cool since I drive by 45 Drives daily. Do you remember that small park at the traffic light on the opposite corner of 45 Drives? I live on that side street there that ends at the park. I'm only a block or so up the hill from there. Did you do any sight seeing while you were here? The Cabot Trail is an amazing drive over multiple mountains, often right on the edge of the water. My wife and I love it here.
Honestly that fan noise is in a great state and I'm glad they listened to the community feedback on that. Sure you might not want to have that directly on your desk, but you also don't want 15 mechanical HDDs click-clacking away on your desk either, and since they're not exceeding that noise floor by any significant degree I think that's totally fair. Just putting something between you and the server will already make it much more quiet than any of the servers I have at home...
My 1U Asrock server has fans that go up to 23k RPM. You can hear them throughout my entire apartment if they're at maximum tilt (tho luckily Asrock boards allow manual fan control, so they usually only run at 5k RPM and are only audible when I'm in the same room or immediately in front of the door to the room they're in.
Gonna have to get this later, wonder do they mail to Japan.
Going to be grabbing one of these to rebuild my Nas in next year, just the chassis in my case but glad to srart seeing reviews.
Nice! Will you do a follow up on how to build it with your own ATX MB and PSU? What connectors are there to the backplane for example?
Also, you mention Supermicro 948, what chassis is that? I can’t find any info on it.
I'll definitely be doing some more content around the server.
Sorry, Supermicro 846. It's a 4U 24-bay that show up used from time to time.
Jeff what is the depth of this chassis?
Even the Rosewill 4u ATX cases are fetching over $200 these days, and this HL15 solves serious problems that an enthusiast will have connecting and running those drives. Not to mention this is way, way easier to work on. If it'd been available when I built my NAS, I would have seriously considered it. As it is, it's an upgrade path for sure. Next time I do a hardware refresh on my NAS, I'll seriously consider making the jump.
I'm still watching this, but at 2/3 through you never mentioned depth.
Can you tell me what the depth of this is? Some of us have very short depth racks at home, hidden in the laundry room for example. ;-)
What is the Supermicro chassis he was referring to? 948?
Sorry, I misspoke. Supermicro 846
In particular for homelab use cases, I would be very interested in the total power draw during idle and load.
I'd be curious to see how an NFA12x25 swap would go given their incredible sound profile. Obviously not server fans but I've been running 6 of them 24/7 for several years. Curious to see temps with that.
Noctua, if I recall correctly, has a continuous operation variant of those fans for industrial uses. These could drop a bit of sound, but the major culprit would still be the 15 spinning rust hard drives, enterprise or not, once all of them get loaded with IOPS...
Not currently in the market for something like this, but seems competitively priced at base and full build versions
@11:00 are you using Wendell's music? 🙂
Is the backplane SATA only or does it support SAS drives too?
SAS and SATA both :-)
I would be very interested to see a video which covers the various considerations for building a NAS from the ground up.
So for example - imagine if you were building a NAS that can work as a Plex / Media server, what sort of Network equipment you will need for various setup (stream HD / 4K / 8K from Nas to Smart TV via LAN), what sort of drives / storage you should consider for things like reliability / read speed, what sort of ethernet ports / cables you should use / look for (i.e what sort of transfer speeds you should be looking for), any considerations that are relevant for things like multiple streams (i.e streaming media to multiple devices), any considerations for things like transcoding.
What sort of RAM / CPU you look for, and how RAM / CPU are relevant when it comes to building a NAS (i.e in what scenarios are these the bottlenecks / what hardware you should get for various requirements).
In addition to the above - I would be very interested to hear any of your added points (in case I have blindspots for example)
What is the best V-Dev drive combination? Like how many drives per V dev ?
Looking for case only interesting alternative is Inner tech 4U-4416. Gives you 16 hot swap bays in 4U format at little more than 1/2 the price (at least in Europe).
This is exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks.
What are the spec.s of that backplane? Noehere I've looked has any info.
welcome back old friend
i would like to have seen what kinda of system you can build in it and what kinda power draw and performance you can get. i think this could be a lot better then nas since they only go up to 10 bays. i would also like to see them do it in 30 drives, i like the set up these better since they hard drive rest on the back pain so air can get pass them better
I wish we could get a collab from you, Wendel, Jeff, And Tom talking about that visit and any exciting things you guys learned or found out. Tech nerd heaven brotha. Lol
The price is painful, but it's really nice to see a good tower case option for mass storage. I don't have the space to put a rack in my house, so towers are really my only option.
Define 7 works but if you want hot swap bays Silverstone has a case for that.
A nice box, although I'm kind of hoping that Raspberry Pi 'toy' they were playing with comes through. 15 spinning drives is a bit more than I'd like, several SSD's, now that would be nice.
As for your outtro, "Italian flavour", yes here all the time, I married one.
Fair price for what its offering. Thanks for the review.
finaly they diside to charge a more resonable price for case from 3000$ to 600 but still 600 is a lot when a normal old style case cost from 20-100 and you can fit 6-8 drive on them , and add other 4 with the 5 in bay
If they made say a HL15-S model that supported 30 drives (or more) and came with the needed cards and cabling to be able to add additional storage (DAS).
That'd just be an HL30 ;-)
@@CraftComputing I was think S for pure storage. As that size and layout is beautiful.
I picked up that you said Xeon Bronze was more than adequate to drive 10Gb/s. But would it be adequate for upgrades to 25Gb/s links and say 4 NVMe drives (Gen3 x4) which is what I am planning for fast storage that later dribbles out to disk? I was thinking I should bump up to the 4210 but am wondering if that is necessary (or enough) to avoid having the CPU be the bottleneck (non-expert here in any of this). Also wondering how RAM affects that?
My Norco 4224 is not loud but quite noisy and warm/hot despite having spend a lot of time and effort to make it cool and quiet.
Having the disks vertical and the backplane at the bottom helps a lot in noise and temps and so far the HL15 is the cheapest homelab friendly of this variant I know of.
When noise is a real issue, then $800 or even $2000 is cheap (when you are in an apartment for example).
Now with larger drives (18/20Tb being more popular now), 15 drives can get you a long way already, but I think a HL30 would be quite popular.
People tend to forget how loud servers are and that not everybody can have a jet engine, sometime you need to pick cool and quiet and be a little expensive.
I really love the concept. But the barebones should be about 200$ cheaper.
And I don't expect them to drop to that price ever. Or if they do it will be in maybe 3-4 years. Just so the early adopters don't feel cheated.
The backplane alone is a $350 part if you comparison shop. Is the case a value at $400, no. But, it’s not a high volume chassis and I don’t see how they’d get it below $350 without major compromises, including profit margin. So, my best guess is they could have offered it at $700. Given what’s actually available on the market, I think $800 was the right price.
That's actually pretty reasonable for what you get. Finding a case with a good backplane for that many drives really limits you to rackmount gear, which if you're not into ex enterprise gear means you're looking at old cases with bad cooling if you want enough bays.
Where do we sign up to test? LOL, I am so jealous, my SuperMicro are LOUD at times. What runs on it? TrueNAS? OMV? Their own os?
Where was this 2 years ago lol I just finished my Define 7 XL built lol
Love the case but 90% of the premium they're asking for is because of the cool backplane (and brand recognition). We're really just talking about some bent sheet metal for $800. If the market wasn't flooded with cheap used server gear I'd suck it up and buy it, but for HALF the price I can get and excellent used chassis with rails.
The current price is going to SINK that thing.
I’m curious what would happen to noise and temperature levels if you ran Noctua’s instead..
I'm of two minds about the price but I think you nailed that topic Jeff.
Supermicro used to make an absolutely wonderful 15-drive chassis that was at least this expensive. This is highly appealing to me, not because I have 15 drives yet, but because I have 9 drives in a Frankenstein configuration of internal and hot-swap add-on cages. It is loud, inconvenient and I can barely keep the thermals in check at 25C ambient with 100% fan speed.
I am seriously considering this case for the consolidation alone as there are very few cases that offer such an open philosophy of parts with such flexibility.
I would very much love to own some 45Drives chassis, but the price for new is just far outside my comfortable price point. Definitely desire it though.
woof... $799? Rosewill 4U with with 15 3.5 bays is looking VERY attractive at $220. While using normal atx power supply as well.
I would've opted for the dime-a-dozen Xeon Silver 4210, since it's still a relatively low power chip but with 10c/20t for more flexibility.
I would love to see a 30 and 45 drive bear bones kits. I have overpowered hardware in my 24 bay chassis's but i wish i could combine my 36 drives into one system.
More power to them for designing the thing and asking $800 for the chassis and backplane. The reality is that a sub $200 version will be on ali express in 6 or 8 months. It's a niche market for sure but it's simple enough to build a case like this for under $200.
If I wouldn't have just built a new nas with a slider case I would have jumped on this right away. Great work @45drives
I like the case...I will agree though, the price is a bit steep.
i see this machine as a great option for a small-medium business (eg media company, Medical office) who has to host their data on prem. $2000 for that machine and that configuration is a great value. I sure hope IX is paying attention as their Mini-XL is around the same price yet you gain far more hardware and capability (in a great case no less!) than their offering.
I think if you swapped out for the new noctua lcp fans, that would be the icing on the cake, and would make it even quieter hopefully
Product measurement..? Can’t find it , not even on website
This would make an ideal replacement for my Unraid server, which is currently down. Don't know who thought it was a good idea to use a USB drive as the boot drive :(
Please repeat the noise test under load with all 15 drives doing something, and see if adjusting fan speed down is viable. Thanks!
This is cool, i live 3 blocks away, guess it’s time to apply for a job there🤞, Cape Breton Island is very unique compared to mainland Nova Scotia, this is Cape Breton :)
$800 for a 15 drive chassis with backplane is a pretty good deal. I remember loading up 6U+ EMC and Sun storage machines when I used to work for an ISP. I'll let you guess how much those things cost. I'd love to get my hands on one of these. Probably throw some 9th gen Intel desktop hardware I have laying around in it and see what kind of nonsense I can get into.
For work I would be quite happy with a 30 bay version for 2 times the cost of the top end price you quoted. Although I would want redundant power supplies, a higher clocked CPU and lots more RAM.
Just bought a qnap rack system a year ago, now I wish I had this as an option at that time
Pretty sweet! That's beautiful, but in the world where old enterprise gear exists, its hard to even look this way other than if you like the aesthetics. Thanks for another sweet video. Looking at those beautiful R730XDs for 250-300$
Yeah, $800 seems pretty reasonable for what it is _and_ for where it comes from. Personally, I still think I'll be aiming for Fractal XLs as I don't think that I can fit a rack in my apartment. But if I could, I'd certainly consider a barebones.
Oh baby!!! waiting on mine to ship......
Does the supermicro have ipmi in full build?
Yes, there is a Supermicro BMC onboard.
@CraftComputing I thought so from looking at back plate.
I dont recall it being stated anywhere, is the backplan sas/sata or is it a sata only?
SAS/SATA
I ordered one back in October. But the price is way too high indeed.
For half of that you can get a 4U InterTech chassis with backplane for 24 drives.
I got it because it’s smaller than a 4U chassis length wise and doesn’t require caddies.
I wouldn't be surprised if you could just replace the 3 inner fans with some Noktua or BeQuiet. And loose the outer ones.
what is the max motherboard size, in inch and cm?
I would like to know since I have a "supermicro x9dre-tf+" and I'm looking for a case to replace.
It fits full ATX, and 'maybe' some larger than standard. E-ATX isn't going to fit though (I've tried in my AV15).
@@CraftComputing
Any recommendations for my board?
I can not wait to get the 2 I ordered in.
I'm interested in the chassis but I haven't seen much about motherboard compatibility. Will this fit something like a Supermicro X10 based dual CPU EATX board?
From there forum, 45Labs say, It will only fit an ATX mboard. The absolute max would be 10.5"X13"
What's the gpu size support like?
in Germany I can get 15 hotswappable drives for around 350-400€ ($375-$430) new, so yeah, it's definitely quite expensive for the use case.
It's a beautiful case, and seems very well manufactured (it's a protocase, duh), but for $800 I have to say no.
What case were you thinking about?
@@meco I'm speaking of the Inter-Tech 4U-4410, with an added 5x 3.5" hot swap bay to put into the three 5.25" Slots.
@@Todbrecherlooked at the prices for those as well to compare 😀
you also have the 4420 if you want more bays for not that much more.
@@Andreas-w True! didn't think of it, as it doesn't really fit my use case right now.
$2000 for the top end model, wow that is surprisingly cheap! I really do think I would go with just the chassis though.
Why only 15 drives though? I can get 15 drives out of a rosewill server chassis for under $400. Sure the build quality probably won't be as good, but it's a server chassis and I only pop open the case once a year if that. More competition in the homelab space is always nice though.
Your the first person I have seen from the 45 Drives Summit to have one of the HL units. I'm sitting here just waiting for my Zimablade to put into production as part of my homelab. I'm so far behind of getting the studio where I want it. ADHD!!!
So excuse my ignorance because I've not had hands on many NAS chassis in my life.
But how is this more compelling than say a Silverstone RM43-320-RS or RM22-312