Is there an easy way to buy the 45 bay chassis bare? i dont want to use the daughter boards, i really just want a case that can hold more than 28 drives. honestly i just want the metal chassis and front/back panels, but im sure they would charge $$$.

I think they are aiming for “cool stuff, easy mode” for those that want to pay for it.

That’s great and all, but if you’re creative there’s cheaper things you can do. Which to me that’s more fun anyways.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Personally, I don’t think they’re really targeting home labbers, they’re really targeting home / small business (meaning <10-15 employees up to maybe 20 or so) who need the capacity, but also can’t swing the true business prices.

Since someone else mentioned Jeff from Craft Computing, I’ll use him as an example:

• It’s a lot easier to drop money on a server (storage or otherwise) when the server itself and it’s recurring costs (the power usage and the extra HVAC costs) can all be written off as business expenses.

• 45D’s prices are still far cheaper than true “enterprise storage” and the headaches they come with (like the relentless sales reps you have to deal with to buy one) with most of the features they’d have (IE - Nimble or any other SAN provider in this case) minus the warranty SLA - obligatory “F@#$ you very much CDW, Dell EMC, and HP”

• On that previous point, yes, you can source parts and build it cheaper. Like any other OEM, what you really pay for is the warranty. Instead of having to deal directly with LSI, Intel or whoever because [component] failed, you call up 45D, given them the unit serial number, and go from there - as my boss likes to say “it’s one throat to choke” - If that storage is vital to your business, downtime costs money squared. Again using Jeff as an example: If he’s screwing with the server off camera, that’s time he probably should have been on camera recording something else. If he is making a video about the issue, then it’s going to take him 3 times longer than it otherwise would have to just fix it (many YouTubers have been vocal about everything taking 3 times longer for the camera than it does to just do it) and at that point, the video is being made as a piece of revenue generating content to try to help offset the cost of the downtime.

Somehow, I just don’t think the product or the accessories they are selling, are truly aimed at the homelab community. I think they are aimed at the tech bro crowd who want to go and sip overpriced drinks While telling their buddies that they have a new homelab even though they haven’t figured out how to turn it on yet

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 :).

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

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

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