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

WICKED video TIm !! Love this unit !!

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.

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.

Hell yeah, I've been waiting for this video.

Why would anyone go with this kind of solution when there are so many 4U chassis (with hot swap bays) available?

Thank you for posting this video 🎉. You have a new subscriber. Keep up the great 👍 work..

Great video Tim! Thanks for sharing it with us!💖👍😎JP

really love your content keep it up!

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.

Looks good, but what I'd really like to see is an HL-6 or HL-8 for 1/2 the price...

Thanks for the rundown, mine ships next week and found this rocon super helpful!

800.- is really a crazy price ! I think the good price is 250.- I have a Fractal Design box with +15 Drives for 150.-

Thank you for including some data on power consumption.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

Hoping they bring us a 30 drive version

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 🙂

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 is the way

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.

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?

Nice!

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.

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.

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

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

If it has homelab in the name, you got Tim's attention

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!

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'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 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.

Unraid can do most if not all of what you want. It even has ZFS now.

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.

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.

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 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???

Thanks for the awesome review. Now I know 100% that the 6 core CPU is more than enough for a dedicated storage server.

nice... but when we get a 30 bay server? :p

What cable option did it come with? There's so many options for the HBA cables and idk what to choose!

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... :)

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.

Phew that thumbnail is pretty!!

Sounds like an ad, looks like an ad. Hell, it even smells like an ad, however that works. Talking points straight from the company. 😮

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.

Are they shipping to the europe?

Are there any dust filters ?

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.

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.

wow. LOTS of info! Thank you!

You weren't interested in disk throughput in any config?

What length GPU and PSU can it accommodate?

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.

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

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

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.

Finally got the iMac on Ubuntu I seeeeee

You were not paid but you were given a gree hl15?

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.

For me, the price is a real showstoper

This'll be nice 2 generations from now when it's $50-$250 on ebay or your favorite reseller

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.

@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.

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?

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)).

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

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.

Where's the HL60??

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.

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.

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.

its ok but I would like to see a hl3

799USD i think ill pass and stick with my 450NZD case.

Ah yes, the 45HomeLab Half Life 15

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.

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.

Power switch is just 'B' without the 'RG'

2k$ without HHD?

Interesting Hardware, but the Noise is a bit much for a homelab. They should have used noctuas

too rich for my blood

If the drives don't exactly read & write 24/7 you can surely get away with putting all those fans to low speed.

Wake me up when the HL30 comes out, then again the supermicro 846 or 847 is a better deal

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

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)