HL15 Production Update

45HomeLab & 45Drives News
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Hi everyone! Happy Friday!

An email will be hitting everyone’s inbox within a few minutes (for those subscribed, anyway), regarding HL15 production updates, but we’ll also include the same copy below for convenience sake. And for anyone who doesn’t receive our emails.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to introduce @Vikram-45HomeLab to the forum. Vikram is our newest team member, and the 45HomeLab Ecommerce Coordinator. He will be your main point of contact by email regarding all further updates, so you’re sure to know his name in the days and weeks ahead. He is a fantastic addition to the team, and will soon be a regular presence here on the forums too. :slight_smile:

Enjoy your weekend,
-Ashley

First off, thank you for your purchase of the new HL15. It is because of innovators like yourself that we offered this product to begin with. Everyone at 45HomeLab strongly appreciates your support, and we are very excited for you to get your hands on the HL15.

We have been absolutely blown away by the response from the community, which has exceeded our expectations. Here is an update on where things stand:

Your order has been received, and it has been queued for production. We are currently waiting for the arrival of a few essential parts which are scheduled to arrive next week.

In the meantime, we have done everything we can to ensure that the HL15 will be ready for you as quickly as possible. We have prebuilt everything we could, so when we receive the final parts, we will quickly begin full assembly.

We will notify you by email when your unit is entering production. You can then expect it to ship 2-3 days after that. Once your HL15 has finished production, a personalized email update will be sent that has the details of your order; including a confirmation of completion, along with a tracking number.

In the meantime, we encourage you to sign up to the 45HomeLab Forum. It is a great place to discuss homelab hardware, software and more. Our team members are there to help with answering questions. If email is preferred, please do not hesitate to reach out to info@45homelab.com. We would be more than happy to assist in any way that we can.

This is a very exciting time, and we are anxiously awaiting – just like you – to be able to deliver your HL15 very soon. Thank you again.

The 45HomeLab Team.

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I received that email a few minutes ago, thought I was getting an early surprise. Like its done and iot’s shipping today or since your the first 10 clients who purchased the HL15, were shipping you 8 Exos 20TB to show our appreciation…

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Thanks for the update, looking forward to hearing when my order is in production!

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Thanks for the update @Ashley-45Drives and welcome to the forums @Vikram-45HomeLab!
Get ready for all us eager bevers to flood you with questions. I feel like I’m the child in the back of the car asking “Are we there yet?” every few minutes.

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Welcome to the forum thread @Vikram-45HomeLab

It would be nice to have something like that (free drives) as an easter egg; but I understand that drives are not always cheap.

It would be great though if 45Drives can help build a community where users like us can be connected to vendors who would offer a way to buy drives in bulk.

As I have an existing TrueNas server (with 10 drives) and a SuperMicro server with 8 drives (and others with 4 drives). It can be hit or miss to get a batch of drives that are not always good. I have been lucky that some of the failures were within the warranty windows. (and yes my home lab has collectively has at least 16 drives each 4 TB) The HL-15 would nearly double what I have collective within 3 server nodes.

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No need to go at it blind @pcHome :slight_smile:

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Thank you.

I am using that same like as a guide as Tom Lawerence (@) suggests on his YouTube channel.

My post is asking if there is a possiblity to there 45 drives partner or offer a way for us to buy a drives in bulk.

A lot of sits tend to category to most to enterprise…

If 45 Drives is creating this type of unit (to use 15 drives), then it would be awesome to have a vendor or a distributor offer a way to buy OEM drives at bulk or something similar.

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That would be cool; I know they work with HDSTOR a bit for their large orders, as they make the standard SATA SSD boot drives used in Storinators, and seem to assist with bulk HDD purchases.

It could be neat if there were some sort of semi-official relationship we could tap into to get new HDDs in bulk (but in smaller quantities than a typical enterprise customer would buy, like 4, 8, 10, etc.).

A lot of times I’ve bought from Amazon, Micro Center, NewEgg, etc., but with the exception of Micro Center, shipping and genuine / new as described parts can be a bit dodgy at times.

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NewEgg was selling new in OEM packaging Seagate Exos X20 20TB SATA for ~$279 USD at one point, or even slightly below that price. Sold by NewEgg / Shipped from NewEgg. Marketplace vendors seem to be where you get into trouble. I picked up two cases (40 drives) when the pricing was okay and they showed up ~2 days later, as described, zero powered on hours, and the serial numbers with Seagate show the 5 year warranty as expected (Refurbished and Renewed you don’t get much warranty!).

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I went to check out NewEgg and the price is $289.99 which would come to $4349 (for 15).

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a 45homelab drive store would be epic. although i would expect any savings from 45drives end for a bulk order, would get eaten up in shipping costs for 10-15 drives safely.

I might just buy some enterprise sas drives used off ebay if i can get a decent deal on them though.

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Yeah, $289 per unit isn’t a terrible price for these at $14.45/TB, I believe MSRP was $669/unit when they were released in 2021 so there’s already a substantial discount applied via NewEgg.

This has been a spot check resource for “What $/TB should I expect to pay?” for me over the years. Otherwise looking at eBay and the like. You can drive down $/TB by doing shucks or by purchasing Refurbished/Renewed but you’re losing the 60-month warranty in the process and will receive essentially zero support when the drives fail, vs. having an advance replacement option with Seagate (including 2-day or even Next Day Air, for honestly quite reasonable shipping rates).

You’ll also sometimes find $/TB dips on 14TB or 16TB units, but then you get less capacity per chassis. I’ve been optimizing for density recently and retiring a lot of 10TB, 12TB and 14TB drives instead of keeping them and adding more 14TB or 16TB drives (but then needing more chassis running and more power consumed) to hit my total space/storage objectives.

I’ve asked B&H and several other sites to price match the NewEgg offers before without success. They’ve come back and said they’d lose money selling at those prices, so no thanks, leading me to believe a 45Drives Store selling i.e., Exos X20, wouldn’t be much if any cheaper.

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I agree that there is a tough sales for the drives as the margins are slim.

The disk drives search site is a great suggestion. Thank you.

I recently purchased a single 20 TB drive. The vendor has not shipped the drive though a label was printed — UPS and FedEx notifies me when any label printed has any addresses I tracked. It seems there are not a lot of vendors that stock the larger drives.

I tried to find drives in batches of 10 with limited success.

When it comes to the drive purchases, I am prioritizing the price per TB by getting higher quality for storage vs a less quality for my software testing via virtual servers.

Collectively I have approximately 26 4 TB drives: 10 ironwolf NAS drives for my true NAS, 4 ironwolf pro drives for an older Dell server, and 12 drives used within two other servers (8 for 1 server and 4 for another) which are a renewed drive.

I have tried goHardDrive and had some success replacing a few drives that reported errors.

I have not used NewEgg in over 8 years — I was not sure if the vendor/site is still trustworthy.

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I ordered a batch of 10 x 18TB drives at serverpartdeals.com. I choosed refurb (with 2 full year warranty), but they also have brand new in big quantities.

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Oof at ServerPartDeals selling Seagate X26Z 25TB drives for $294/ea. Those are SMR not CMR and really aren’t a good choice for most people (they’re fine if you are AWS S3 with a couple million of those drives deployed and software teams to handle SMR peculiarities). Hopefully you got 18TB CMR drives!

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I got this one : Dell Exos X18 ST18000NM002J 18TB SATA 3.5" Refurbished Poweredge Server HDD — ServerPartDeals.com

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:+1: Looks like a good choice and a great $/TB. I just saw Seagate Exos 2X18 ST18000NM0092 18TB SATA 3.5" Recertified HDD — ServerPartDeals.com which is a Exos 2X18 and I’ve been wanting to tinker with those for a while and there’s some great posts about the quirks of these with ZFS [1].

Also had no idea ServerPartDeals had reasonable $/TB on NVMe, I’ve always looked at them just for SATA/SAS 3.5" HDDs so thanks for the pointer :slight_smile: Something like Dell D7-P5600 SSDPF2KE064T9 6.4TB PCIe Gen 4.0 X4 2.5" Poweredge Server SSD — ServerPartDeals.com may be just the ticket with the 3D printed drive cage (minor modifications might be needed, we’ll see!).

[1] How to ZFS on Dual-Actuator Mach2 drives from Seagate without Worry - Wikis & How-to Guides - Level1Techs Forums

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We might want to move discussion about HDDs themselves into a new topic. I’ve created: Buying hard drives for the HL15 - deals, vendors, etc

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Hi Everyone,

In case you missed the email that went out earlier, and for those who aren’t subscribed to our mailing list, here is the latest update regarding the HL15:

Hello,

You might remember last week, we let you know our production was waiting on a key part before we could begin assembly. We have some good news! The parts are all arrived as of yesterday.

What’s next:
Our team has scaled our production facilities to keep up with the all the orders we have received. We have been blown away by the demand for the product. It may take up to 2 weeks for your server to enter into production (depending on where you are in line).

Once your HL15 does enter into production, we will send you an email.

Your HL15 will take around 2-3 days to be assembled and tested. You will receive another email once your server has shipped, which will include a tracking link.

The 45HomeLab team would like to once again thank you for your purchase and for your support. We can’t wait to see what you do with your HL15.

P.S. Stay tuned for a video showing the performance of an HL15 to be releasing tomorrow.

The 45HomeLab Team.

Any inquiries can be directed to info@45homelab.com

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Just got the email, great news indeed! will be looking out for the vid tomorrow!!