HL15 Beast Is Available For Purchase

TTT · November 11, 2025, 6:05am

Vikram,

I agree with many of Digital Garden’s points and I do hear your POV. That said, let me expand on those points a bit while also adding some new ones. However, before we get going, let me first say that I am a proud HL15 owner so I’m in the soup here with everyone else. Ok, onto the show…

(1) DIY Buyers vs. Turnkey Buyers

It is definitely true that there is a material % of buyers here who want the HL Homelabs Team to deliver them a fully built, turnkey system where all they have to do is plug it in and turn it on.
But based on the technical sophistication of many of the comments in the forums, it feels like there is also a material % of us who want you guys to sell us these cases bare (Case + Backplane only… notice I didn’t include Fans in that list ) so that we can DIY them however we want.
Given that, please just be very careful about how much weight you are giving to making product design decisions that affect ALL of us because you’re worried about how it may impact only SOME of us.
- When that happens, then this product is being unnecessarily held back from what it could be.
Now to be fair, I don’t want to understate the importance of the Turnkey buyers.
- They matter a ton.
- This product doesn’t work without them as they help get this product to a higher scale of sales, etc. thus making this product commercially viable for you to produce.
- So I get all of that. But let’s not over index on them either.

(2) HBAs

I think we should have a deeper discussion about what HBA Cards we would want, would buy, already own. etc.
Why? Because some of us already own many of the cards you are discussing above (ex: Broadcom 9400s, 9500s, 9600s, etc.)
Some of this is just POV, as the LSI 9300 series SKUs have been the go-to workhorse for the 45 Drives Team for many, many years given the heritage of the Storinator’s SATA based SKUs.
- And I do get why you guys have done that.
- You guys have chosen to stay married to the 9300 series for so long due to reasons of standards, supportability, cost, and assumedly volume.
That said, to help maybe broaden that POV out:
- The LSI 9300 is 11+ years old (Storage Review reviewed them back in 2014 here.)
- So if we’re talking HBAs, the 9300 is pretty long in the tooth kit at this point.
- And to be fair, the 45 Drives team has also moved past the LSI 9300 too as well in very specific cases such as the Stornados, etc.
So overall, yeah, some of us will have moved and/or be very welling to move past the 9300 at this point

(3) Backplanes

Ok, here is where I am very sympathetic to the points you are making.
I do get that it is not cost effective for 45 Homelabs to have to R&D a whole bunch of Backplane parts that are specific to the HL Homelabs Team
- What you instead want is parts that can be also shared with the 45 Drives Team.
- I get that from a scale, costs, etc. POV
And I also hear your point that you don’t want to fragment configs, etc.
- I get that from a Support Team POV.
TLDR… I don’t think much more needs to be said here
- it sounds like you guys are working on it, doing the right things, trying to get a part that works for both sides of the company, and thus assumedly working on what I affectionately have termed “LEGOs for Backplanes” as had been discussed in my other post here
The last thing I will say on this topic is please also make the Backplanes you guys use from both the 45 Homelabs and 45 Drives Teams available as custom parts to the Protocase Team so that they can offer them to customers designing custom builds as well.

(3) Beast - Product Market Fit

Speaking for myself, and maybe others too, I think some of the underlying sentiment you guys are getting on the SSD Backplane being SATA only is the combination of the SSD SATA Backplane + the price.
FWIW, I personally think it’s harder to position the Beast at $1,800 given the Backplane only has support for SATA / SAS. Why?
- Let’s start with the actual product positioning verbatim as it was written here:
  - “The HL15 Beast Homelab Server is the next evolution of our best- selling HL15—developed hand-in- hand with feedback from the homelab community. With a larger footprint and upgraded architecture, the Beast delivers unmatched power, flexibility, and cooling capacity for the most demanding self-hosting environments.”
- IMHO, that’s actually a great product summary.
- The issue though is that the Beast, as currently sold, doesn’t quite live up to those product aspirations. Why do I say that?
- Because right now, I feel like the Beast is sort of placed squarely in the middle of 2 opposing target markets.
- On one hand, the Beast is not always high end enough for the high end crowd as it (currently) lacks Tri-Mode on the SSD side of the Backplane.
- But then on the other hand, this case is not always low to mid range enough to be enticing enough for those lower end markets either. Why?
  - Because it’s priced at $1,800 (whereas say the HL15 was priced at $800 (Case +PSU only) out of the gate).
  - If I’m in the market for a low to medium end of the rackmount case market, there just are better options (ex: Sliger, Silverstone, etc.) than the Beast starting at $1,800.
So I think some of the feedback here would be more favorable if the vision, pricing, and execution for this case were a bit more aligned.
To close this point, I think it’s really important in the early product phases to give yourself the correct amount of freedoms
- It’s totally fine for you guys to give us low end products that cost less
- It’s totally fine for you guys to give us high end products that cost more.
The key is just for you to just be very clear about which target user(s) you are or aren’t aiming for and then executing the product to match those goal(s).

(4) Minimum Price

Again, I am sympathetic to the arguments that you are trying to keep costs down as prices are exploding all over the place on computer parts for all of us.
That said, if lowering the min cost is 1 of your primary goals, then TBH, I still think you guys are really not really using all the tools available to you.
You could cut the min pricing down from $1,800 right off the bat if you just offered us a SKU with the Case, the Backplanes, and nothing else.
- No Fans
- No PSU
- Etc.
Now let’s put actual numbers behind that:
- Parts
  - Corsair RM1000x
    - Amazon = $170 / each
    - Quan = x1
    - Total = $170
  - Noctua NF-A14
    - Amazon = $25 (ish) each
    - Quan = x6
    - Total = $150
- So right there, you guys could cut the base price of the Beast Base SKU down by another $300 - $400 (ish) or so if you just sold it as the Case + the Backplanes and nothing else.
  - I say “ish,” because the prices above are retail and you guys obviously get better pricing than we do
But doing that would drop your min price down somewhere into the $1,400 - $1,800 range.
- This would be a material win not only in terms of a lower base price, but also because the DIY crowd among us wants to customize the PSUs and the Fans that we want
  - We don’t want to have to pay extra for parts that we don’t need.
- Example
  - I own the HL15, and so I loved that you took the feedback from the community and ditched the original HL15 Fans by going with Noctuas Fans as the stock fans on the Beast.
    - But even then, I still don’t want the stock fans on the Beast.
    - I would instead prefer the G2 Noctuas
    - Now again, I get that you can’t please everyone and so I’m not asking you to.
    - I’m merely asking you to give us the chances to make our own choices while offering everyone a lower base cost on the Beast in the process.

(5) Target Markets

As I said above, please just be very careful about how much weight you are giving to product design decisions that affect ALL of us because you’re worried about how it may impact only SOME of us.
I think there is a common misconception that the people in these forums only have Homelabs use cases.
- While I acknowledge that the Homelabs use cases are probably the majority of users, I don’t think it’s the case that they are ALL of the users.
- Why do I say that? Again, go back to Digital Garden’s point above about the Hardware Survey here.
- To give the exact stat, 75% of us voted for you to offer us either a Tri-mode Backplane or Both (Trimode or a Hybrid backplane only).
- Ok, well, if 75% of us are voting for Tri-Mode to be an option, then this forum is clearly filled with a massive amount of people who aren’t just doing basic Homelabs use cases.
- There is clearly a lot more medium to higher end technical needs present in these forums here and so a product positioned as “The Beast” needs to reflect that.

(6) PCI Slot Covers

Ok, so I know that the basic case design was inherited from the 45 Drives Storinator lineup and those cases only have 7 PCI Slot Covers.
- But man, 7 PCI slots covers is not where you want to be on a case that is billed as a GPU case meant to offer “unmatched flexibility for the most demanding Homelabs environments.”
- This case needs to be at least, at least at 8 slot covers.
  - Really it should ideally be even higher than that given it has a 5U ceiling.
- Check out how the Puget Systems Team snuck in a 9th PCI Slot cover here by modding what is clearly a Silverstone RM44 OEM case.
  - And this case is only 4U, it’s not even a 5U case with a higher ceiling.
  - This may seem like a “small thing,” but it’s not because PCI Slot Covers are too scarce of a commodity these days on rackmount cases.
- Here are some common examples of PCIe Cards that gobble them up:
  - 1-4x dual slot GPUs
    - And if that last point didn’t grab your attention, how about triple slot GPUs?
    - If I even add 1 triple Slot GPU to the Beast, 43% of my total PCI Slot capacity just vanished just by adding that 1 single GPU.
    - But it gets even worse, because if I have a Triple Slot then I almost certainly also have an HBA on a Beast Build, because that’s the easiest way to feed the Beast’s Backplanes.
    - Ok, so given that setup, I now only have 43% of my PCI Slot Covers remaining as I’m using 57% of them. So as you can see, your PCI Slot Covers start to become very scarce, very, very quickly given that we only have 7 to start with and given that most medium to higher end GPUs are Dual or Triple Slot Cards. And I’m not even going to try to get into Quad Slot GPUs, lol.
  - HBAs
  - NICs
  - 1-4x AI Accelerator Cards
    - Which BTW, can also be Dual Slot cards
  - Capture Cards + attached breakouts
  - Extra USB Card(s) to deal with the fact we have lots of peripherals straddled across 2 different, yet concurrent standards (USB-A + USB-C) that our motherboard can’t full supply
  - Etc.
- Especially given how hard it is to find Rackmount cases with more than 8 PCI Slot Covers to begin with.
  - There is just a massive gap in the Rackmount case market that is so huge you could drive a truck through it right now.
  - Any case manufacturer that offers a rackmount case well above 8 PCI Slots is going to make a lot of $$$ because it’s all crickets in terms of options until we get up to say a low end Supermicro GPU Case starting at $20K.
    - We can’t afford a $20K Supermicro GPU case
    - But we could afford a high quality GPU and/or PCIe oriented case from you guys that really tried to focus much more on handling say 10+ PCI slot covers
  - Also, just to save the question since I’ve gotten it before:
    - …no, open Mining Cases aren’t always a great solution to this problem either
    - Because if I have a bunch of components I really care about in my build, I am probably going to want case panels surrounding my case to protect my components.
    - Especially if this is deployed in a home office (especially if you have kids or pets) or even just an office.
So there are just a lot of small tweaks that could be made to how the Beast is built that would make a very big difference very quickly with adding more PCI Slot Covers being one of them.

(7) The Wins

However, I want to look at both sides of the equation here so that we don’t just focus on the nits.
I also want to make sure that we also celebrate the Homelab Team’s wins here in shipping the Beast vs. the original HL15 as they delivered some really important steps forward for this product line:
- Additional depth to accommodate larger Motherboards (ex: E-ATX)
- Additional depth to accommodate normal sized GPUs
- A proper SSD Backplane for the Beast vs. having to sometimes get a wee bit creative on the HL15
- Dust Cover
- Etc.
The Homelabs Team completing this work is huge because this collective set of improvements are all critical steps forward for the HL / Beast lineup as they greatly expand the amount of use cases that the Beast can help us all with.

In Closing

Vikram, we actually have spoken before and you’ve always been very great to deal with so thank you for that.
- And thank you for listening to this talk
- I hope you realize that everything above is all coming from a place of passion for your products
- I do get that you can’t solve all the world’s problems.
- I do get that every product is a compromise of some sort by definition.
That said, I am really excited about the 45 Homelabs Team because I think it has a huge niche it can (and is starting to) really grow into and really thrive in within the industry.
- There are so many needs you guys could serve beyond just Storage that are already here or just around the corner (ex: Homelabs, GPU Workstations, AI, CXL Enclosures, etc.)
So I hope all of this feedback helps and I’m very excited to see the new Backplanes that the team is cooking us up in the labs