HL12 - A New potential model for 45HomeLab?

[craftside]

Hi the Team,
Here to propose a suggestion design for a HL12 based on the Syno 12 bay form factor,

I currently appreciate the Synology 12 bay form factor,
Its compact and has enough slots for extensions for multiple volumes.
The width allow for 120mm fans with good airflow and silent operation.
Having access to the drive on the front is ergonomic and makes maintenance easy. It has 10 Gbps ports and has all the advantages of the HL8 form factor but with 4 more drive rack space, And it has enough drive to stay compact and avoid bigger box like the HL15.

Problem of Synology is, it has quite an expensive price point, closed source OS and software. No easy setup to install any Operating System on their boxes, They also have old hardware CPU/RAM machines because they dont want their home-user/small company products to compete with their enterprise products. In the end, all their hardware lacks behind even on the enterprise side of things.

On the market unless we go custom; I didn’t find a good 12 rack bay form factor that works. The idea is to setup Proxmox or TrueNas Scale with last gen server hardware in a box that can evolve and be modular, ideally with some M.2-nvme slots on the motherboard and a pci slot for 4x nvme pci extension card or small pci GPU.

The setup would consist in Two 6 SATA or SAS drive backplate, or unified 12 6+6 one if it exists ?

The motherboard could sit above the drive box with a Mini-ITX form factor, since it would not be an embedded/integrated (driveplate + motherboard) design, unless one exists for this purpose (i dont think so).

Powersupply could sit on the side of the drive box, or in the space with the itx box room, either low profile or full size one.

Could be also the Qnap style of spacing but with a 12 slots bay set where drives sit horizontally: Image reference: https://gearopen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/1606323946_1605350-695x695.jpg

So I don’t know if this idea resonate or makes sense for the community of builders around. But it could be a good design that enable modularity, and many use cases in my opinion. That form factor chassis could be adapted with different hardware solutions.

PA.

[craftside]

[craftside]

This design can be setted on another face of the cube, 90° to the left.
Setting the powersupply (PW) down at the bottom, motherboard on the left.
If the drive bay both allow vertical n horizontal positioning.

[DigitalGarden]

Is your core requirement more about having 12 drive bays, or having a cube like form factor?

What if the HL8 design were simply extended with another four bays to about 16.5"x8"x8"?

What if the HL15 layout were simply shrunk to hold only 12 drives and an ITX motherboard, that would probably be dimensions of about 14"x17.5"x7"?

With a bit more design work they could probably do a 2 chamber design with the motherboard on one side and the backplane(s) on the other with the drives in a 2x6 rather than 1x12 arrangement. That could probably be done in 10.5"x12"x12", so a bit smaller than the Synology’s 10.6"X11.8"x13.4".

The nice thing about the drive/backplane layout in the HL15 and the larger 45Drives pods vs almost all other storage server designs including the HL-4/8 is that the fans blow air across the drives freely perpendicular to the backplane; they are not fighting against the backplane pushing air towards it.

The trouble with 12 drives is there’s not a lot of motherboards to support that (with a direct wire backplane). It’s hard enough to get 8 SATA nowadays. With an ITX board you’re probably going to need an HBA in the PCIe slot, and then they don’t make 12-port HBAs, so you’re not going to save any money there; you’re going to be getting a 16-port HBA and either not using four of the ports, or maybe designing an area in the chassis to hold four 2.5" SSDs. Maybe there would be space for a x8x8 riser card to bifurcate the one PCIe slot into two to be able to put a GPU or something else in there as well. The alternative is MicroATX, but then the chassis gets slightly larger.

A 6-drive backplane also presents a wiring challenge since all the SFF connectors support groups of four drives, so you either have two connectors with two channels going unused for each backplane, or you need to design a single backplane–perhaps with half of the drives inverted so that the connector sockets line up down the center-- that handles all 12 drives. I guess another option would be three 2x2 backplanes. In any case, it’s a bit more difficult than them saying “we have a 1x4 backplane, a 1a8 backplane, a 1x15 backplane … a few clicks of the clone tool and we have a 1x6 backplane.”

Just my thoughts. There are advantages to having more than 8 but less than 16 drives.
There’s also the TerraMaster T12-423.

[craftside]

The Requirement would be to have a compact, silent, low power box with enough drives and modularity to handle most configurations needs from storage to compression processing/conversion / web VM services. Higher ends/modern CPU can have a good balance between power on the task and lower sleep mode power. So yes, either mid desktop tower size or cube compact are good directions.

Yes the HL15 case is too big in my opinion, we sacrifice space with this one, it is good because it can handle most configurations possible. The microatx may also draw more power than needed, same if a full-size power supply is used. It can still be optimized with a smaller motherboard and be efficient that way, but then the space of the case would be ridiculously big.

I think the airflow of the Synology 12 bay is better than the HL8 because drive have larger airgaps between each other, the backplane 2x120mm draw enough flow out. The Synology draw very little current. For both design if temps are in range, it works out (current < 40°C < 50°C).

That is where custom motherboard and backplane win because they are low power, compact and can map PCI lanes directly to SATA or SAS drives. With the modular setup (and I lack the knowledge) I know its more of a constraint to find a good match between the drive backplane and the motherboard M2 to SATA, PCI HBA.

The TerraMaster T12-500 Pro form factor is nice with 10Gbps. The intel 12th gen maybe a problem, no AV1 encode, 2 gen behind but low power, default ram is non-ecc, 14th gen mobile version are not out yet from Intel. I saw that TrueNas can be installed on it, so it can be a nice alternative if the idea is to stay compact and dismiss the modularity. Lots of good choices in place for this config.

So Yes Two design versions that are interesting,

One is a HL15 like HL12, that is more a tower format than a rack bay one, allow full GPU / Power supply and microatx, 3 fan front row stays the same, the middle fan row can be removed, just a simple pull out at the back 120 or 140mm.

The other, a HL12 design like the HL8 + 4 drives 3.5 (if 12) + 4 drives 2.5 (if 16).
Finding the best space setup and connections for the stack between:

• One line of 12.
• Two lines of 6 = 12
• Three lines of 4 = 12

Taking into account that adding 4 * 2.5" could be possible if the link have 16 connections in total like you specified. Some Qnap boxes have this approach.

So, I still think there is something to do from a case design perspective to keep things in the modular way like the other 45HomeLab products.

Keeping the compact and silent aspect of the HL8 with more drives.
Thanks for your quick answer.

[Wesh]

I am looking for an 8 drive cube style but that can also have space for 8 es.1 nvme drives, this in a cube option that can be rack mounted, or small shallow rack mount option. As long as we can put 3 cards in it, A raid card and 2 dual port 10gb or 40gb cards. Maybe an HL16