Liked the look of the 45Drives chassis for a while but always been put off with the fact you had to buy them as completed servers. Great that they're making chassis available now.
They do sell the chassis alone as well, you just have to email them and get a quote. You get the same options as this HL15, where you have to at least get a backplane and/or PSU with the chassis, but it's bare besides that.
Awesome case and video... $800usd is waaaaay more then most people would be willing to spend on a home nas chasis even if it does last for 10 years... I think it will primarily find its way into the smb market then filter down into the home lab when its decommissioned.
You guys are crazy. My mostly plastic PC case was $250. You want this at those prices? I think you're forgetting it has a NEW backplane in it. Not a used one. My PC case and a used backplane is near what you guys want to pay for this new.......
Wendell - most of this goes over my head, but I must say, I find myself looking forward to your vids for your positive attitude, being focused on moving forward, totally looking ahead at a time when IMHO that is a rare commodity. Please keep it coming and thank you.
Ikr lolol. I've followed Wendell since the previous channel he was on and I still struggle to grasp tf is being talked about. Other than that he's very ahead of his time and knowledgeable.
I don't really get who this chasses is for? My fractal define 7 has room for 12× 3.5 inch hdd, 4× 2.5 inch drive, and more drives if you get creative, a rtx4070, full atx mobo, normal psu, and it's just a desktop case with normal desktop case pricing? In the front there's 3 fans and a filter. I'm using this as my main PC right now, but if I ever decide to change it out, it'll be a kick-ass server chassis due to the amount of drive bays and ease of building in it.
There is a lot to like about this chassis - compared to my NAS case (Antec P101), this has a lot of advantages. The backplane alone is really valuable. The question is, is it $800 worth of value? I'd say 'no', though for some people it might be.
It's not for home use it's for enterprise and there you want to have easy swap, support and rack mount. It's very cheap for what it is. For consumer not. Have a look what professional storage solutions costs and if you fully populate it and run it 5 years 24/7 it's is the lowest part of costs here
@@newstandardaccount yea I know however it's pretty difficult as many people assume an old laptop or a tiny pc is a home lab. Granted it's fine but a real lab would use actual server hardware. I endorse to use a different naming schema like: Pro home lab Or calling the other stuff just "hobby pc"
@@elalemanpaisa at the end of the day regardless of what we call it, it is being marketed as a home solution yet it is way more money than most people can justify. I'm not knocking it either - it appears to be a very well built case, and in an enterprise where time is money, that can make a lot of sense. For most home users however, they'll be able to find better ways to spend $800.
You should checkout the Sliger CX4712. It is a much more reasonable price point for a bare case than this. Made in the USA also (so same manufacturing advantages/disadvantages as 45 drives).
@@Level1Techs The Sliger case comes with a backplane and has the option of coming with 3 or 6 Noctua fans (at a slight discount). It's only $400 in comparison and those bays are hot swap. With some Icy dock accessories you can fit some SATA/U.2 drives in the 5.25in bays, or put in an actual optical drive for you to rip your movies directly to your NAS.
@@blazewardog Did the sliger CCX4712 change? It definitely did not come with a backplane originally. It used direct wired with no backplane. If you search CX4712 on youtube and watch the "infocomm 2022: sliger designs showcases CX4712" video you'll see there is definitely no backplane there. That being said, it is definitely a great chassis!
Really love the stuff coming out of 45 drives and wish I could justify the cost. When it comes to W680 I think Asus has taken the market with the WS W680 series as they're cheaper than Gigabyte/Supermicro/ASRock Rack, better VRM and have better IO. So unless there's something specific that the others provide there isn't much decision making to be had anymore.
I had a completely different experience with 45Drives. They don't hold your hand, and you're typically on your own unless you pay for a support plan. I'm watching this video thinking "I have no clue how you had this experience except that you're a RU-vidr, and I went in as a regular customer". I paid them over $10K for 2 cases + an SSD mod. I never felt like a first-class citizen there because I only bought cases, no hardware. And in my dealings with the company, they don't feel small.
@@LabiaLicker if you're not extremely technical, it'll be difficult to pinpoint an issue. I got direct-attach boards replaced because I noticed the lights weren't working, and through pictures, we figured out some LEDs were damaged. On the other hand, I still don't understand staggered start because their docs say it only works with their OS. Doesn't make sense because the PSU should be handling it. I haven't asked them about it because I'm not sure if this is a non-support-plan question. A question that requires a support plan is why drives are sometimes not showing up at boot or why adding a drive eventually causes ZFS errors or disappears from Linux unless that drive was plugged in when the system booted. Is it software or hardware? How do I debug when this is my only SAS system? It's up to me to figure out those questions. I'm not even sure if that's normal behavior. 45Drives can't debug that kinda stuff without a support plan, so it's tough to figure out if a cable, power supply, or board is bad without doing the work myself. If I can narrow down my question or request (replacement parts), then I can get answers. Does that info help?
@@Saturn2888 Staggered start has nothing to do with the psu. It's usually done by the controller when it inits the drives. If you have a raid controller for example it's usually an option. A consumer grade motherboard with only 4 to 8 drives won't have it. They might be saying it's unsupported because they don't want to hold your hand for XYZ manufacturer and they just can't waste their time finding that for you. If you do tech support you learn that you just can't support everything. Maybe 20 or 30 years ago you could but nowadays there's just too many brands and config options. You are responsible for your own choices of products you buy. The manufacturers should support you if you don't want support from a company like 45drives. Think of it like this. Would you take a BMW into a Toyota dealer and expect them to be able to diagnose and replace parts in that car? I'd not even trust them to not damage it Leta lone diagnose and fix it. Expecting a manufacturer to support hardware they didn't supply to you is just a nightmare in their eyes.
Same experience (but slightly cheaper) for me and Asustor. Geerling got an email address for issues, I had one of the worst support forms I ever saw (for 2 years until they fixed it). I don't think anyone should be buying home/server hardware based on RU-vid experiences.
Some of us are just madness incarnate. Muwahaha... Though I speak for myself when I say, I prefer to build with my own hands. I love that aspect of life.
I'm retirering my haf 900 this build. I prebuild in it but in two month's there is going to be a new case. That haf have seen floppy drives. 12speed cd rom drives. single core cpu's corede duo, i7's ryzens, But it has served his time
Thanks for pointing out the Freezer 4UM, I have a 5000 series threadripper, and boy it was sweating under an NH-U14. Woudlnt throttle, but it was getting up there, and just surviving off of "well I'm not REALLY going to hit it with an all-core workload like prime95"
Thanks for all the ideas on hardware. I have my eyes on the chassis to replace my old Rosewell. What you do for HA with pfsense is what I run at home too, with evpn and mpls mixed in my network because I like to make things hard
having a nice sas backplane is nice, but other than that, i'm just not sure why I should pay $1000 for a box with some fans and a backplane in it when I can get something like a fractal design meshify 2 xl for under $200 that has more slots of hard drives and big boards and arguably better cooling...
i tried to buy a a used epyc, i went through three and returned all three, they had been programmed to dell or whatever, i had to get a new never used one before it would post.
Next server at home will be AMD 5600G + ASUS Prime B550M-A + and to start with 32GB DDR4. This motherboard + AMD 5600G support up to 128GB. 32GB will be around 350 euro total for 32GB or 550 euro for 128GB. The bios support 8x4x4 PCIE bifurcation when running 5600G. Later when i got a adapter from aliexpress for 8x4x4 (2nvme + 8X PCIE) i will try 2x drives + network card on 16X slot. Motherboard itself support 2x PCIE NMVE drives.
These guys are so damn expensive, even worse than Caselabs was. 800 bucks for basically an ATX case. I contacted them to get a price on JUST THE CHASSIS on the 45 drive rack mount case and depending on the PSU, prices ranged from 2k to 3800. That's crazy, what they are offering isn't really worth what they are charging when you can get a used 36 bay supermicro for 500 bucks.
i've just started to watch the channel more after I've followed a tutorial from your video about a mini home lab with TrueNas Scale. I have no idea why this is called "level1techs". I mean the things you guys do on the video, like this one for example - to me it's just insane & out of this world. I would love to have this sort of setup but man I'm broke, and my dreams are short-lived usually, plus I'm a total noob. Anyway, love the video!!
I'm not sure I would want to buy this Chassis for my home rack due to well firstly it's $799 without hardware and second it has no hot-swap front bays which are easier to work with. I'd have to pull this entire chassis out to access the screws to remove the top plate. Like I would forgive that on a $199 case but $799? - I can get a $399 SuperMicro with 16 front-swappable hot-swap bays. Or I can pay $550 and get a Gooxi with 24 hot-swap bays and a SAS expander backplane built in with ATX PSU support. I'm honestly scratching my head as to why someone would want to pay more money for less stuff? I could see it being useful if you need a super shallow server but still.. that price is hard to stomach for 15 drive bays without a SAS expander included in my opinion as that alone would necessitate buying a larger HBA with 16 drive connectivity which costs more money and so on and so forth I'm not sure it makes sense to me this product.
yeah it's kind of strange. The only benefit is less noise (because of large fans), which is debatable for a rackmounted case anyway. This case is a "cut down" version of their larger ones with 20+ drives where it's normal to have them come from the top because that's the only way to fit so many. But it's clearly designed in a way that is "more convenient for them to make" than actually useful in this form factor and market segment
I thought I finally got who the target market is: nerds who want to build their own 10-20k$ servers from new parts, and don't want to go for a pre-built/used for the similar price. Case costing 5-10% of the build may be justified then. ...but, your comment just destroyed my argument before I've posted it. Realistically, you can buy a decent spec used machine for 800-900$
@@notserpentis I don't understand the hype for their cases at all. The things have to be slid out to change drives. But as for the price...I spent $868 back in 2018 for a 3U SuperMicro chassis brand new from AcmeMicro. Too hard to find used for the specific backplane and PSU setup one may specifically want. But I will backtrack on the sentence about cost. I looked up my invoice as I was typing that sentence, expecting it to be at least twice the cost of this 45drives thing. But that gains me 1 more drive slot at 1 less rack unit of space. Drive caddies. Two power supplies of a higher wattage, and something to bring them together. Most stuff on it is tool-less. The power supply board can be plugged into the motherboard for management info stuff. Same with the backplane. If used with one of their boards, everything is going to line up with the air duct that sits inside, which means you don't need fans on the heat sinks. And then last year right before Thanksgiving, I found someone local selling a server inside the same exact chassis. Loaded full of 4TB SAS drives with old X9 hardware, for only $500. If you jumped up to 4U with SuperMicro, that gives you 24 drive bays. So yeah, I don't get the market for this either.
Canadian company selling in USD to Canadian, so I would have to pay the currently ridiculous exchange fee of almost 40% + 15% tax of course... Sucks to be Canadian right now...
these are real nice however very pricey for what is essentially a case. I really want to see backplanes for 10-50 bucks depending on size as I can make my own HDD racks even with fans for peanuts. I'm thinking backplanes in the 2/3/4/6/8/10 variety. I generally try to do 4 or six myself when making my own drive cages as two stack of 120mm fans fits perfect. i'd also like to see old school cases with large amounts of HDD cages for under a 100. full server towers all that. the prices are way out of whack. i don't understand why drobo and all these off brands charging so friggin much for a backplane plus simple case.
I have been thinking recently, what is the point of no bottleneck? (for consumer level connectivity) in both spinning and flash scenarios By no bottleneck I mean cpu, networking and drives operate in 100% mode (I know, nothing is ideal it will be lower) So something like: I have 32 lanes of pcie. 16 to storage, 16 to network. My x number of gen y cores does all the parity calculations and stuff without dropping the speed It there such a golden ratio?
ive been drilling out the rivets of the super micro psu and removing the whole module and replacing it with SFX power supplies and a home made bracket to fit in the case, there also quieter
Since ASRock spilled the beans that they are testing regular Kingston non-ECC DDR5 64 GB UDIMMs with Micron memory chips on the X670E Taichi for a total of 256 GB on AM5, have you heard anything about the release of Micron DDR5 ECC 64 GB UDIMMs…? Did they maybe intentionally skip the 48 GB step?
48 GB DDR5 UDIMMs have basically been a crutch for economic reasons for about a year since it hadn’t been possible to mass-produce the memory chips for 64 GB UDIMMs. Unfortunately 48 GB ECC UDIMMs from Micron, Samsung and SK hynix seem to never have left the sampling stage. I’m an ECC fetishist so that bums me out - I can’t personally justify a Threadripper purchase.
1:05 _"Circuit Breakers that have chips in them that are overly sensitive to people doing mad science in their house."_ Preach! Yeah, the GFCI's in my garage do not play nice with the VFDs I use to run the 3-phase motors in my workshop.
@@marcogenovesi8570 They don't do wye-delta starting obviously, but just running AC power through a rectifier and capacitor to get DC leads to a poor power factor on the mains line.
And an order of magnitude more time wasting and annoyance on you the customer. I have been building my own computers for over 20 years. I have been forced to buy cheap components from time to time. Those components are always more expensive in time, frustration, and every way but money.
I suppose if I were going to drop 10K on a 128 core epyc 9754 that will dim all the lights in your house when fully loaded, sure I'd throw in an $800 case with a pretty blue face plate. Congrats that money is no object in your house.
Is there an all-2.5" drive option? I can't seem to find one. I have a bit of a unique use case in that I want to build a family NAS, but it needs to be light enough it can be carried out the door in an emergency (we live in a tinderbox Victorian-Era farmhouse) and it needs to (really) not suck on data throughput. It needs to be able to sustain 4 PCs running backups to it simultaneously, each over its own 10GbE NIC. Currently we store family PC backups to external USB 3 SSDs, and once a month those drives leave the house, get driven to the bank safety deposit box we have to be able to recover our lives should the absolute worst happen. There, they're swapped with the alternate drives from the previous month. Rinse, repeat. Each computer in the house has ~1TB of storage on it, and we follow the 1 + 6 full/incremental backup cycle, so the external SSDs are 2 TB each. So, with a 7-drive NAS, the current system could be replaced with a RAID Z3 array. With a 14-drive NAS, it could be replaced by a Z30 array (double the write throughput, which is pretty much where the "it feels as fast as having the local drive" part comes in). Since there are ITX boards with 2 M.2 slots +3 SATA ports out there (or you could get one with 2 SATA ports and boot off a USB stick), this is a feasible setup, as long as the chassis to support it exists and you acquire 2 M.2 to 6x SATA adapters. I went to the trouble of checking if the Fractal Design Define 7 Nano has enough internal footprint to support mounting 14 SATA drives which all receive active cooling. It, in fact, does if you're willing to drill a few holes and mount some 2.5" drive cages (16 max if you do something a little crazy with a dremel). But, if there's an off-the-shelf solution out there, I'd much prefer that.
I have no doubt this is an awesome chasis, but the only people I've seen tout its "value" so far are people who were sent one for free. i know Wendel is very ethical and trustworthy, but it's impossible to be completely impartial when you were wined and dined at 45 Drives HQ. I'll wait to see what people who actually pulled out their credit cards think.
I think what it boils down to is if you're looking to buy a new chassis, this thing is a pretty good value, especially compared to the type of enterprise gear it's competing against. But if you're like me and prefer to e-cycle some retired enterprise gear, the value is less apparent, but it's also not an apples to apples comparison (new vs used)
@biochemscott 100%. Seems you too saw through the weekly Ad blitz for the HL15. Be on the lookout for Lawerence Systems’ glowing review in a week or two.
You're starting to build my cluster, I have a heterogenous ProxMox cluster w/ a forbidden pfSense router, ~300gb memory, 2 GPUs, ~68 threads. Everything network boots, which is a point of failure. Has Intel confidential Xeons, Zen 3, every flavor of Linux, Windows, a domain controller, automated certificate issuing, the whole 9 yards
The largest miss with this chassis is the HDD target only. Sure, you can use 3.5" to 2.5" printed adapters, but it's wasted space. I'd love to see a hybrid version of 8*3.5" + 12/16*2.5". It would make much more sense for HomeLab.
Hey Anton, So the great news is that this is simply our very first homelab product. We have enterprise hybrid nodes for all of our chassis going all the way up to our XL60s. We are taking everything we learned building Enterprise grade hardware for the last decade, and shrinking it down to the homelab, while maintaining the build quality and robustness we are known for. If you are interested in a hybrid server for us, take a look at our enterprise F8X1 - It is the HL15 form factor (AV15 is our Enterprise naming) however it replaces 3X HDD slots for 8X SSD slots - This gives you 12X HDD slots and 8X 2.5" slots in the exact same form factor. While I have nothing to announce to you right now about this specific model coming to our HL lineup, definitely keep checking back over the next few months as we have big things coming :)
3.5" drives are unlikely to be the way to go in the future, so the bracket and backplane is likely to go in the trash. Even with the setup you have, I'd go directly into the drives instead of through an HBA. PCIe over cables is great theoretically but horribly unreliable in practice, as you touched on, at least for gen4+.
$800 for a case and backplane alone? I work with metal on the side and I'm gonna come right out and say it... I'm definitely in the wrong business. Definitely buying a name here.
im really interested in the omnipath but wendell always only teases the issue: the $30 cards on ebay only have one port, you need the two port cards to create a cluster chain right? or does each port support two connections
Apart from the fact that this is being pushed by the manufacturer... In that you went there with a few other youtubers, what sells this over other rack cases out there?
Eh, it's neat but it's too much "LARP like a full 45Drives case" and too little "actually makes sense at the price point". I know they can't compete with most other usual suspects that make the cases in asia but at this price point it is much less user friendly than most other cases at similar drive nuumber
@@TechPewGuy I guess here's how I look at it: I paid that much for a used supermicro chassis. Admittedly, what I purchased was a 36 disc hot swap enclosure which I ended up using as a jbod enclosure. The factor I think you aren't considering is the back plane. However, maybe I am not considering something that you have. Do you have a suggestion for a case that has a 16 drive or 15 drive back plane?
@@edwardallenthree currently I have an r730xd, and 3 or so R720XDs. I got those all free, so caveat there. That said, if I was starting from scratch id probably only get a rosewill case as janky as they are and then cherry pick HBAs off eBay or something. The backplane is nice for sure, but I think the price is inflated regardless. Great points you make.
@@TechPewGuy I literally did exactly what you were describing. I have that old case in a box, good riddance. If you're using forward breakout cables, you're in for a world of pain.
If you're doing a nas with some virtualization, is it worth heavy ram vs some ram and dcpmm nvdimms in memory mode? An x11dph-t can do 4x256gb nvdimms + 12x32gb ddr4 ecc dimms, relatively affordably. The OS sees 1tb ram
I love the short configuration of the HL15 chassis. However, it bugs me that, because of the physical layout of the HL15, the number of drives is 1 short of balanced (Not a Multiple of 4). If I were choosing between this and the ISTARUSA M-4160HD-ATX I'd have to go ISTAR. Yes it's a little longer of a chassis, but you get 16 toolless, front mounted, hot-swap bays.
Which brings up a point I've made to people who talk about how expensive the HL15 is. Yes it's expensive but compared to most 12+ 3.5" drive chassis that you can buy new and use a regular ATX power supply in it's pretty decently priced given the quality. There is a rosewill that will do 15 that is around $300 but most of the others are around $600-$700. There are some brands that are in the $400ish range but good luck finding them from a US vendor and getting one shipped to the US makes it as expensive as the rest. I'm sure there are probably some options I've missed and of course you can always go second hand but while missing some enterprise features it's not as terribly priced as a lot of people think.
@@nadtz Hey! Mitch here, Chief Architect at 45Drives. I think you definitely hit the nail on the head on a lot of this! So, we are homelabbers at heart on the R&D and support team. We love this stuff. We have grown a following over the years of fans but we always would hear how they would love to have a chassis, but the enterprise models were just too expensive to justify. This was the biggest reason we jumped into the homelab ring. This is very much a passion project for us. Keeping in mind that we know this is a premium product. We understand there are amazing choices out there for home labbers, and many of us (myself included) are used to surfing ebay for second hand enterprise gear, or going with a nice cheap steel chassis from Rosewill or something similar (I personally rock a Rosewill directly below my Storinator in my homelab hehe) The HL15 is to a storage server what I would consider a Origin or MainGear PC is to a gaming PC.. It's a boutique premium product. I can't tell you how many people who have come down into my wreckroom where my homelab and gaming setup is and have immediately gone over to my Storinator and were like "wow, what is that!?" It is very aesthetically pleasing. I'm actually shooting a video on this exact topic this week on our RU-vid channel. We want to make sure that people understand exactly what it is we're trying to do with the homelab lineup. We understand the current HL15 isn't going to be for everyone. Thankfully we have lots of great things planned for our HL division, and hopefully eventually we will have something that will appeal to most of our audience!
it is a high speed/bandwith low latency "special network" for servers in close vicinity. It sacrifices cable and cost so it's not really competing with ethernet
It's useful if you have a cluster of servers running storage or applications that talk to each other all the time. I.e. if you can't make a big honking server big enough for your performance needs
when you need more performance (or storage space) than a single server can do, you must use many servers. Often you need a way to "join" them so they act like a single big server. Omni-Path is the special cards and cables you use to join many servers to make a "single big server". It works like the server motherboards with multiple CPUs, but it joins multiple server racks. There are other technologies that do the same job, Infiniband is the other big name.
yee 800$ for case ,, you can buy a old style touer case for 20$ pay 50 a metal worker to make you some mods and you got exactly the same thing , my oldest case is actually 20 years old , buy it new in 2004 with my pentum 4 lga775 , is now my cold storage server with a i3 1150
