Hello Everyone,
I sent a message to support and they recommended starting a thread here.
I have a unraid setup already, but would like to migrate to one of these HL15 chassis. I want to move my mobo, cpu, memory, maybe PSU etc, into one of these chassis.
All of my drives are SATA and my understanding is I would need to buy the chassis and appropriate HBA from the store to make this work.
Any suggestions or help would be appreciated, and happy to answer any questions.
Thanks.
It might help to know the specs of your current setup, but yes and no, you obviously would buy the chassis with or without PSU from the store. You probably do not need to buy the HBA from the store unless you are a stickler for buying only new hardware. Because I think you are in the USA (?) you also need to consider the Trump Tariffs, so even if you needed a new PSU or HBA, it might be better to shop prices on that and buy it separately depending on what countries are standing downwind of the President on any particular day.
For the PSU, if you are considering using what you have it is good to know what that PSU is, because ideally the PSU should have four seperate SATA/PATA outputs on it (not one cable with four molex connectors).
For the HBA, the LSI 9600-16i in the store is overkill for SATA HDDs. Your best bet is to look for a pre-owned genuine LSI 9305-16i like;
https://www.ebay.com/itm/166853489105
The HBA you choose would determine which cable set you select when you place the chassis order.
I second getting the specs and model numbers of the hardware you’re looking to move to the HL15.
You may not need an HBA at all if your motherboard has enough SATA ports already. Although, I recognize most motherboards don’t have 15+ ports on them so that’s probably a long shot. 
Here are the specs.
ASRock Z590 Extreme
Core i7 11700k
64GB of Ram
10 Disks - 96TB for the array
2 nvme SSD’s for cache
The reason I am interested in a new HBA card is I suspect one of mine is acting up. I have had a few two many drive failures lately, and would rather just get a new one to rule that out potentially.
OK. There’s no real trick here if you are reasonably used to assembling PCs, especially since you are mostly just migrating an existing system to a new chassis, not asking us what the best CPU and motherboard would be for an Unraid build.
The two main things you need to solve are the PSU and the HBA, but then you didn’t tell us what you currently have.
The main thing for the PSU is understanding how it gets power to the fans and backplane in the HL15. There is a small power distribution board that expects four molex inputs, and each of those should ideally be connected to a separate SATA/PATA port on the PSU. The four molex connectors don’t power specific drive groups, it is just a way of spreading the load since a single wire/connector is limited to 11A or so. You can get away with as few as two ports, but the more the better.
The answer also depends on how price sensitive you are; if you purchase the Chassis + PSU from the 45HL store you are paying essentially $260 for a Corsair RM1000X and four custom power cables that connect the PSU to the PDB. You can buy a RM1000x on Amazon or B&H for $185 and add the custom cables in the configurator for $20 if you do the bare chassis order, saving about $55 assuming you get free shipping on the PSU purchase.
For the HBA, if one purchases the fully built HL15, an LSI 9400-16i is included. But AFAIK, 45HL doesn’t resell a 9400-16i as a separate part or addon to a bare chassis. You could source your own 9400-16i, but it has tri-mode features you don’t really need. There is also a 9300-16i, but that runs hotter than the 9305-16i, so the best general guidance would be to get a 9305-16i unless you can find a 94xx-16i or later series card for less for some reason. The thing to know for the HBA is that the backplane has four SFF-8643 (Mini SAS HD) ports and when you purchase the chassis, included in the price you get to select one of seven different cable sets to connect whatever HBA/motherboard someone has to the backplane. For the 9305-16i you’d select cable set A.
The thing about buying HBAs before the 9500 series though is hey are all discontinued, and there are some counterfeits floating around. So, you are usually purchasing second hand unless you have enterprise money to burn, and you need to look for reputable sellers. That’s why I pointed you to the Art Of Server listing. He is known to thoroughly clean and test the cards he sells and weed out any counterfeits. You pay a bit more for that. You might be able to find a 9305-16i or 9400-16i for $180, but you’d be rolling the dice a bit more on the provenance of the card.
If I am reading the web page right;
" 2 x PCI Express x16 Slots (PCIE1/PCIE3: single at Gen4x16 (PCIE1); dual at Gen4x16 (PCIE1) / Gen3x4 (PCIE3))*"
You would want to put the HBA in PCIE1. If you have a GPU thet you didn’t list, you can put the HBA in PCIE3 but you might experience a performance hit on multi-disk ops. Since you are running unraid and not zfs, I doubt that is a problem since Unraid to my knowledge typically doesn’t distribute R/W across more than two or so disks concurrently.
Does any of that help? Maybe I’m missing what issue(s) you think you are going to have. The HL15 case has standard ATX screw positions, you can connect the fans to your fan headers; you might need a couple of fan-out cables to connect more than one to a header, Even the stock fans are now PWM.
The 9400-16i was available back in January but now seems to be removed from the store. The link I have goes to a 404 page. That’s a shame as they were the best price I found for a new genuine card at that time.
Thank you for all the info.
That all does help, sorry I forgot to include the PSU and HBA cards that I use. I have two LSI SAS3008 cards currently.
So it sounds like if I want to move to the HL15 chassis, I would need the Chassis, Powersupply with special cables, and one of the HBA cards you listed to handle all the drives connected to the backplane.
I just use the built in Intel Graphics on the 11700k, and I am very experianced building machines, have been since I was a teenager and I am almost 40 now lol.
Yes.
Most of the videos on the HL15 are from creators being gifted prebuilt units, but here’s one of the empty chassis if that helps. This is of a v1 unit, so your v2 will be a tiny bit different. It will have a dust filter and if you do buy it with the PSU, you’ll get an upgraded 1000W model. (I guess another change was real PCIe slot covers instead of twist off ones.)
