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?
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 :).
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.
I wish I had half of the wallet that 45 drives thinks I do.
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?!
Regular homelabbers dont buy racks and use 15 bays. In the day of 18Tb shucked drives who needs that many bays??
You have been banned from /r/DataHoarder
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.
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.
~$150-170 (depending on sale) over the newegg price for the drive new
I think it was during the self hosted podcast last episode or the one before, they had 45 drives on. They basically said the drives that you can buy from their store will be marked up and they completely expect you to buy them elsewhere.
I remember the post from 45 drives asking about what things homelab/datahoarders were interested in. Around 3 out 5 people responding mentioned pricing being important. 45 drives blew right through that stop sign.
…because 45 drives literally targets top of the line.
top of the line.
such a bleeding edge part
This is supposed to target us. That was the whole point of all the consultations they did and community engagement.
After the nightmare of 45 drives in production, no way would I ever wish that on myself at home.
Their pricing assumes that homelab enthusiasts are all famous YouTubers who either get free hardware or have cash to burn. Nonsensical indeed.
Why on earth are sas cables 30$? What’s so expensive about sas cable when sata cables are like 2$
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
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
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.
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