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.
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.
$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 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.
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.
Wouldnt it be possible to take base spec and source cheaper addon parts?
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.
45 drives is in Canada? Interesting. I did not know that.
I didn’t look as deeply as you have but I got their email today too and thought “who is this for?”
Don't worry, they have a lot of shelves too.
They don't know their audience
They are targeting rich homelabers.
I don't think homelabs were ever the intended audience. There are MUCH more price effective, reliable, and performant options over their cases + expanders.
I was mainly interested in the chassis, and put my gear in it. When I seen the price, I was less excited.
I'll just go serverpartdeals/ebay...
Availability. You can't get old parts forever.
I wish I had half of the wallet that 45 drives thinks I do.
I was excited for the chassis but not so much now that I saw the price. Does anyone have any recommendations for something similar?
Rosewill or sliger.
Rosewill RSV-L4500U 4U is my budget choice at a DIY server chassis. (at $229.99)
I have a couple of those Rosewill's in my rack and love them.
I even was able to remove the mid frame fans in one and put in an AIO cooler with a 360mm radiator for my Threadripper.
Really good bang for the buck.
Used Supermicro 846 and 847's are a bit cheaper and more bays, and easy to modify to be fairly quiet.
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?!
Maybe 45 drives wouldn't need to jack up their prices if they'd stop donking all their cash giving it to tech influencers.
I dont think thats making a dent in their marketing budget. Also judging by the replies they do actually reach their target audience.
So far it seems they know where to find their target audience just not what they actually want.
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.
...because 45 drives literally targets top of the line.
This is supposed to target us. That was the whole point of all the consultations they did and community engagement.
Their pricing assumes that homelab enthusiasts are all famous YouTubers who either get free hardware or have cash to burn. Nonsensical indeed.
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.
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.
~$150-170 (depending on sale) over the newegg price for the drive new
After the nightmare of 45 drives in production, no way would I ever wish that on myself at home.
Hm, all of their enterprise hard drives are SATA. Those don't support multipath...
I think they are targeting ceph. ceph usually wants a switched network afaik
Also isn't greeting ebay dell emc r730 server cheaper than getting this "premium storage server"? It has 8gb ram and some crappy 1.9ghz xeon
Why on earth are sas cables 30$? What's so expensive about sas cable when sata cables are like 2$
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
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.
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
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.
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?