I’m just curious to get other people’s thoughts on this since 45Drives just recently released their 15-bay rackmount case that’s supposed to be aimed toward the homelab community.
Some of the items being sold in the e-store don’t make sense to purchase, specifically the LSI 9600-16i HBA and the x540 10Gbe NIC.
Why would the top of the line LSI 9600-16i be offered (for $1.1k)? Wouldn’t the more reasonably priced 9400 series card make more sense? I guess this would be if you’re running NVME drives (which the 9400 can also do)? It just seems strange to offer the top of the line and not anything else. Especially when the HL15 is aimed at the homelab community.
Also, the intel x540 network adapter. We go from the most recent, top of the line LSI 9600-16i HBA to a network adapter that was released in 2012 (for which they’re still asking $400 for). Wouldn’t it make more sense to offer the x550, or better yet, the x710-T2L?
I also understand that companies need to make money but the profit margin on these add-ons and accessories seems extreme. For example, the Intel XL710-QDA2 40 gig NIC is being sold for $818 while at FS.com it’s being sold for $520. That’s a 57% markup for an already marked-up item.
Is the HL15 and accessories really geared toward homelabbers?
To be fair , they design and manufacture the case in canada … so it makes sense that it’ll be a little more expensive than when you get the labor done in china
And yeah when you compare it to synology , i guess you still get more bang for the buck … but YMMV
Man, I saw 800 for the case and thought it was not bad, honestly, with the backplane. This is not from China. It’s from Canada and made in country. I’m not sure what people here expected. 400 dollars? 200 dollars? 800 for the Case, and the backplane is reasonable due to where it has been manufactured. Sure, you can get another case for 200 or 300 dollars or DIY your own, then do that. China is cheap. If I hadn’t built another NAS already for a truenas server, I would pull the trigger on this.
Downvote away.
Completely agree. I’m not sure why people expected the price to be competitive with retired enterprise gear from eBay. It’s a premium product, made by a small company in Canada, for an extremely niche audience.
Personally, while I haven’t ordered one myself, I’m glad there are more options available that aren’t made out of riveted sheet metal and flimsy plastic.
I am not sure some stamped tin and a few circuit boards are worth $1000.
IMHO this is just a $150 Rosewill RSV-R4200U with backplanes, so maybe $300 max.
I would MAYBE think about this if it came fully function certified system for $1000 that I could just drop drives into, but even then that is out of the typical homelab price point and entering the SHO market.
I have 3 or 4 chenbro/rosewill whatever Chinese server cases. I also have a 45drives q30. I’m never getting another rosewill/chenbro.
I bought the full build, no sales tax/ shipping, just a 61.77 international fee. :). Definitely would not buy anything on the estore though because can just google and get it cheaper :).
Availability. You can’t get old parts forever.
After the nightmare of 45 drives in production, no way would I ever wish that on myself at home.
I’m glad it’s not just me that thinks their prices are insane (and not in a good way). At first I thought maybe they were showing Canadian prices so I added something to my cart and checked. Nope. USD.
I recently bought a metric crapton of Seagate Exos 20TBs and it looks like they’re overpricing that drive by about $130.
I think it was during the self hosted podcast last episode or the one before, they had 45 drives on. They basically said the drives that you can buy from their store will be marked up and they completely expect you to buy them elsewhere.
~$150-170 (depending on sale) over the newegg price for the drive new
Also isn’t greeting ebay dell emc r730 server cheaper than getting this “premium storage server”? It has 8gb ram and some crappy 1.9ghz xeon
Hm, all of their enterprise hard drives are SATA. Those don’t support multipath…
I think they are targeting ceph. ceph usually wants a switched network afaik
I’m not sure if those are related - couldn’t a Ceph node use two SAS controllers? I haven’t set it up so I’m not aware of caveats.
they can but ceph is more targeted to run with commodity hardware. usually u want more ceph nodes with cheap hardware than better hardware with less nodes
Why on earth are sas cables 30$? What’s so expensive about sas cable when sata cables are like 2$
sounds like they’re probably selling off leftover inventory from customer builds.
these parts wouldn’t make great sense for a 15-bay, but for a 45-bay probably right at home.
$30 for a 3D printed 2.5" to 3.5" adapter, lol. That’s like 30 cents of parts and labour right there. You can even buy those made of steel for a few bucks because it’s so easy to make…
I checked the prices on a few of the SSDs on CDW in a different browser, just to make sure I wasn’t getting a discount.
CDW was cheaper by a few $ WITHOUT my company’s discount.
Laughably high price on the chasis and backplane. More expensive than a Norco 24 bay with less features. They didn’t seem to have read what people wanted in their thread.
They read the ones that agreed with what they already wanted to make
I work for a large Entertainment company that we were looking at 45 drives and they refused to fill out normal tax paperwork for B2B and ACH as we were going to be doing continual purchases with them just not a 1 off as we have 3 petabytes of storage now with a EMC Isilion that were trying to sunset. The company i found to be polite but not grounded in reality in doing business we don’t want lines of credit with them we want to pay in good old debt free money. oh well . I am glad to see I am not the only one who went WTF when looking at the HL15
We asked for a quote for a small SAN, after the initial email exchange trying to setup a meeting, never heard back and they didn’t reply to any of my attempts to follow up.
The problem is neither one of us are Youtubers. I only need 10 Petabytes so I must be a commoner to them