Finished building my HL15, the only thing missing is a GPU for Plex which I have in storage somewhere but need to go get it still. It’s on the floor in the living room for the next few months as I am waiting for the keys to my new house, there it’ll get rack mounted.
Because it’s on the floor and there’s 2 cats and a dog I put some mesh filter material in front of the intake fans. All 6 fans are Notcua Redux fans spinning at around 500rpm and are super quiet.
I’m using TrueNAS Scale. Put all my containers in a VM because those TrueCharts apps and K8s are overcomplicated for most use cases imho. TrueNAS only runs storage and perhaps Plex (not sure if I will run that in the VM with GPU passthrough etc.).
I had someone 3d print the SSD cage which can be mounted in the back and will probably use that for some more SATA SSDs I have laying around and connect those straight to the motherboard.
Slot 4 of the backplane is broken so no disk in there. I’m talking to 45Drives to get it fixed/replaced.
Storage:
2x 2TB Samsung NVME
2x 1TB Samsung SATA SSD
1x 1TB Samsung SATA SSD (Not shown in pic. Used for downloading, unpacking, repairing)
1x1TB WD Purple (Not shown in pic. Used for running 2 IP cameras)
8x Exos X16 16TB in RAIDZ2 using one of the NVME for SLOG
I have 4 PWM headers on the motherboard for chassis fans. Used two of them with 3 way PWM splitter cables. One of the others runs the 40mm fan which I screwed on the HBA because it would go over 100 degrees C otherwise.
Got one free for maybe an exhaust fan if needed but the drives and CPU are 37 degrees after 48h of continuous writing. The HBA is now 60 degrees.
One downside of this build is the Exos drives. They are bloody loud, even when doing something as simple as streaming a movie via Plex you can hear them clearly which is annoying the hell out of me.
Cool build! I also slapped a Noctua NH-U9DX i4 in my build and it was a perfect fit! The printed SSD sleds are cool! I wanted a reason to print them but my bays are filled with HDDs lol.
I thought about putting 15 Samsung 8TB QVO SSDs in but the cost would be way too much for what I am using it for. Also those SSDs are kinda slow after it used up it’s builtin cache. Maybe in a few years if prices some down and SATA SSD sizes go up.
WD Red Pro’s are quieter but not super quiet and they cost almost double what the Exos costs.
Shrink tubing. I don’t like using electrical tape for long-term applications. It gets gummy and loses grip. Not a fan of shorting out my PSU because of a quick fix.
