Homelab

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.

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

They don't know their audience

Availability. You can't get old parts forever.

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.

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

I'm assuming it's because they are in Canada, and prices tend to be higher there.

They need to find a US warehouse to ship to US customers.

I always buy used NICs and HBAs off eBay, way cheaper even if I had to replace it on my dime.

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.

Hm, all of their enterprise hard drives are SATA. Those don't support multipath...

Seriously, they call it a homelab store and are easily charging 40% more than just going to other resellers. Like $90 for a Supermicro AOC-SLG3-2M2. You can buy them on Amazon for $55 all day long. It's a dumb card, you have to enable bifurcation on the slot you install it in.

I certainly didn't build myself a homelab to pay double for everything.

Sorry Marcus, I don't feel that overburdened by money.

It's too bad because I really like the idea, as there really are not much options here in Canada for this sort of thing, but holy crap they charge way too much. If they could make the 45 drive case + sas expander setup about $1,000, and then you add your own components, I think that would be a decent deal. When I built my 24 bay supermicro server about 10 years ago it ran me around 3k. Case was around $1,500 and then components around there too. Now that we lost NCIX and Tigerdirect there is nowhere to buy Supermicro stuff though.

I was mainly interested in the chassis, and put my gear in it. When I seen the price, I was less excited.

Their pricing assumes that homelab enthusiasts are all famous YouTubers who either get free hardware or have cash to burn. Nonsensical indeed.

Don't worry, they have a lot of shelves too.

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.

$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...

The most common reason ppl buy rackmount gear for the homelab is for training on enterprise equipment and because they find it dirt cheap on ebay. That is despite the noise and running costs.

They said they wanted to build a pickup truck. They ended up with an industrial excavator 😅.

Regular homelabbers dont buy racks and use 15 bays. In the day of 18Tb shucked drives who needs that many bays??

This whole thing is weird especially since people like geerlingguy and the self hosted people promoting it. I mean those guys use raspberry pi 4s for most of their own stuff?!

I wish I had half of the wallet that 45 drives thinks I do.

I remember the post from 45 drives asking about what things homelab/datahoarders were interested in. Around 3 out 5 people responding mentioned pricing being important. 45 drives blew right through that stop sign.

Why on earth are sas cables 30$? What's so expensive about sas cable when sata cables are like 2$

...because 45 drives literally targets top of the line.

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.

Those prices are so far out of reality, compared to their MSRP counterparts from some basic online retailers selling the exact same part. Well over 2x markup in some cases (those Seagate drives, for example).

Hard pass.

lol wtf

The case alone is 800 dollars… a used super micro sever that’s 24 bays is 1600 for something with at the time of this post.

256GB ram 2 x E2630 v3s LSI 12GB controller Rack rails

Why in the hell would I pay 800 dollars for an empty case?

It’s not cheap to operate a business in Canada

They are recommending the 9600-16i because it is new and available. The 9400 series is older and no longer being manufactured. Anything available is either used or new-old stock.

For the case I actually think it’s a fair price for the product. The problem is the product is not a good fit for the homelab market.

The markup on everything else is absolutely insane though.

Also competing with used gear that is going through e-recycling facilities is going to be hard for them.

They made a good product but missed the mark imo.

We do not know if FS is taking a loss or what their profit margin is. FS.com also sells in a MUCH higher volume and similar companies like BJ’s we don’t know what items could be loss leaders.

Those drive prices are absolutely absurd, too. $181 for a 4TB drive? Go fuck yourself 45Drives.

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.

Is the HL15 and accessories really geared toward homelabbers?

kinda, but also on small businesses. 45d's pricing has always been ridiculous for home lab scenarios alone, even considering the fact that they develop/maintain some software for their products and for general public

To answer the question you asked: No.

The prices are totally logical for what you're getting. But what to buy doesn't make sense for the majority of true "homelabbers". Even the base price of the HL15 at $800 USD doesn't make sense. I got a Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 Full Tower and shoved 16 drives into it, some extra cables, a standard ATX power supply... all brand new and you can get the RAM/CPU and other accessories for significantly under than $800 price tag.

I would argue that the HL15 is a great option...for a small business.