Great video! Subscribed!

Great video. I watched the whole thing (although I did swipe the play bar to see if it reveal viewing behavior!) Thanks for making, and for sharing your BIOS woes!

With 16 HDDs I think a mini ITX motherboard is not more an option, cause you need to provide a good power and a good ventilation, and so a case will be big enough for mATX/ATX motherboard with few extra PCIe for SATA adapters, and a fast ethernet, and a proper bifurcation for M.2 drives. Like, you can use full ATX motherboards for E5 Xeon v3/v4, or Threadripper 1950p, etc.. PCIe gen 3.0 is fine there.

10:12 Nice cat!

nah, (almost) nobody's buying 45drives for a homelab, so that particular argument i don't think is valid. what would be a more valid one is that things like hl15 are not that big, so they might be used in small-medium businesses where there's no dedicated server room, so they'd benefit from a more quiet option also why would you bother with windows for plex?

check cables first as cheaper than an HBA

One advantage in the US is that supermicro cases like SC846 are plenty on ebay. Isnt that a better choice than HL 15?

Thank you, i'm not the only one. Cpu makers love limiting pcie lanes.

100% would rather have back case top screws

I have the 20U version of the rack you showed and I just ordered 2 cases from Sliger (will be here Monday) with rails. What issues did you have with the rails and what kind of solution did you come up with?

I caved and ordered the HL-15 last week after foreseeing the issues you mention. This is the first time I've actually seen proper footage of the 6 bay SSD caddy which I also ordered! I'm on the fence about replacing the fans. I thought I'd get it first and see how it is, but I know I'll be happier just throwing Noctua fans in from the start. Supposedly you can reduce a few watts since they are PWM and won't be 100% 24/7. 45drives does offer a Noctua option at purchase or a kit post-purchase. I opted to forego that because it includes a fan hub which needs a SATA power connector. If you are powering their backplane with the recommended 4xPSU <> Molex connector, that doesn't leave many SATA/peripheral PSU ports left, so I'm snagging a few fan splitters to run each set of 3 fans off 1 MB fan header. This should make cabling cleaner too since you don't need extension cables to reach the hub etc. I like your approach of replicating the pools but wouldn't that ideally be done on a separate box to avoid any shared point of failure? One other thing - their Noctua kit comes with 3xNoctua NA-IS1-12 inlet spacers for the 3 front fans. Apparently these improve both airflow and noise when the fans are right up against grills and other obstacles.

You're absolutely right, not worth tearing your hair out troubleshooting cables and backplanes when you've got this awesome offering from 45Drives. I also sprung for a CX3151a not too long ago. Had been debating for a while given the price plus shipping to Australia but man, such a nice quality case.

Eww I thought part of the HL15 price was nice fans. I honestly don't get the appeal of the case due to its price.

Uh oh, intel 13th gen... Hopefully the update keeps it safe.

Great video thank you!

Lack of cooling is a big downside for the sliger case IMHO. I had trouble with rosewill case too like you. Turned out that the 8087 cables had gone bad. I replaced them and the zpool is happy now.

* chef's kiss *

meow

Thanks for this sir, im about to start planning a large storage box .. Been looking at this 45drives case too !

there are m.2 to 6 port sata cards for $39.

You buy one of B550 quality boards and Ryzen 7 5700G. They have 2 PCIe M.2 NVMe slots on board. And 4x4x4x4 PCIe configuration, enabling another 4 M2. NVMe without expensive card. Quite a few have 2.5G LAN. My server with this idles at ~25W while having all the server services running... eating some 28GB out of 64GB RAM, ready for workloads. This SATA obsession reminds me of: "Roads?! Where we're going We don't need Roads!"

Mmmmm....3 x NVME slots: add 3 x NVME PCI-E Card Riser III...18 drives plus the 8 onboard SATAs then add PCIE SATA Card 16 Ports 6Gb SATA 3.0: 18 + 8 + 16: 42 SATA 3 drives. But wait, there is more: 4 external USB ports. That is a whopping 46 drives. IF you want more drives though, you can change the USB drives so each USB port connects to a dual HDD dock (dual 10 TB drives), which will then change it to 42 internal plus 8 external drives.....50 drives. Imagine the cost of 50 x 10TB drives

Where did you get those M.2 boxes?

CAT!

Can you use the m.2 slot to have an internal bootable install linux OS? This might be useful in the event that your linux system fails to boot and then you can boot into the install m.2 in order to call up the terminal within the install m.2 to make repairs on the main linux system.

sks8300-8x looks more interesting TBH, and twice cheaper

Ai accelerator

Ha, I have a switch from the same company. But mine is 8x2.5+1x10g unmanaged. It's currently put away in the storage, because I first upgraded NICs to 5 Gbit which it doesn't support, and then to 10 Gbit over UTP.

With those PSU caps, it wouldn't be the first time fake Japanese branded caps have been put in a Chinese sourced device. I'm not saying they are, or aren't fake, but the labeling isn't 100% trustworthy.

Use a m.2 to sata adaptor.

kvm ?

Your videos are always interesting. This is way cheaper than a unifi switch i guess.

The 2.5/10g aliexpress options have been a game changer for the homelab scene. STH coverage and testing helps a lot too.

I forgot to mention, but there is a PoE version of this switch. It seems to have dual 40mm cooling fans so it's probably a bit louder. Model: SKS7300-8GPY4XGS-P. Link in the description. Also, if you have any issues with DAC's not being detected. Go into Switching -> Port Media Type Config and change each SFP+ port mode to DAC. "DAC 50cm" works fine on all my ports regardless of how long the cables are.

so it's a case. so you have to buy a mb and cpu and ram and OS....then the price is about the same as other nas which comes with everything but drives

This hase driven me insane looking for a motherboard for this

Great video! Thanks for sharing it we do appreciate it! another possible use is M.2 to MiniPCIe to add a mini PCIe Firewire 800/400 card. Many advanced audio users still have Firewire Audio Interfaces mostly under Linux (like me!) I haven't tried that yet. But I will let you know hahahah. Thanks again

awesome video 👌 👌 u helped me a lot

i wish i could time travel

Ich habe hier einen Robotron A7100 inkl Robotron Monitor und Drucker :-) auf dem läuft ein emuliertes! MS-Dos 5 .. sobald er fertig überholt ist, möchte ich dazu was auf meinem Kanal zeigen.

How would power consumption with a build with this and a 13500T look like? For example: Mentioned MB, 13500T, 32GB Ram, 2x12TB Seagate IronWolf and low to moderate workloads in Proxmox VM`s.

Hello. And an m.2 to usb? Thunderbolt can de added?

I use an m.2 to pcie to AI accelerator

this actually looks like the perfect board but you can get the same features just by going with an mATX board for sooo much cheaper.

You can connect certain ssds to the M.2 slot and if you have a micro ssd, it is possible to dremel off connections until it fits as a guy on Reddit did it, but whatever the case, you’ll probably have to use uefi mode to boot off it

I love your videos. I dont't find an of these cases satisfying. I think the best choice for me is the Dell Poweredge t330.

The Problem is that IO is very power hungry. The more lanes a CPU has the higher the idle Power Consumption. My Server uses about 15-18w idle (at the wall, drives spun down) (ryzen 3600, 1x m.2, no gpu, 2 RAM Sticks (RAM needs ~2.5w per stick), 4x8tb drive) but even with optimizing if you need the PCI lanes you basically can't get any lower, maybe you can achieve 10-13w at the wall, but if you need a 400$ PSU to do it, meeh...

10gbe network adapters is the best m2 variation

Nice video exactly what I needed

for the board with the SIM card on it, it does required to be equipped with miniPCIE form factor wwan card. (i.e Quectel EC25)