Strong ditto on the idea that Homelab users would like better Tri-Mode and NVMe options from 45 Homelabs. That said, given the very diverse needs across these forums, I would love to see this need addressed by 45 Homelabs offering us all a set of Cases (2U / 4U) with swappable internal Backplanes. This could solve the all kinds of use cases (HL15, Storinator, Proxinator, etc.) being asked for (Tri-Mode in this thread specifically) because 45 Homelabs could just sell you a 2U or a 4U Case with a modular backplane built into the chassis. And then to tie this back to the OP’s ask, if you had this, then offering a Tri-Mode backplane upgrade for the HL15 would be trivial. And to be fair, there is nothing stopping 45 Homelabs from offering us a Tri-Mode Backplane upgrade kit for the HL15 now, they work out all of the kinks, and then offer it more widely in some new cases after that.
Then at time of ordering, you go in and decide what kind of Backplane do you want to build? Do you want say all SATA drives in a 4U case (ex: like say today’s HL15). Or do you want to pay a bit more for Tri-Mode (SAS, SATA, NVMe), but in exchange have far more flexibility down the road? Or, if we had a fully modular backplane, do you maybe want a bit of both?
For anyone doing mixed SATA / NVMe builds right now, this is a huge help because you can’t really fit that many NVMe drives in an HL15 for key workloads such as say a ZFS, Ceph, etc. build (really anything where you need more than a small handful of NVMe drives) and that becomes very, very limiting very, very quickly if you want to do caching pools, high speed NVMe storage pools, etc.
Thus a modular backplane would really help us all better futureproof these cases while still allowing 45 Homelabs to pay for their on-going R&D costs as we would buy new Backplane boards over time to upgrade our cases to new storage form factors (ex: EDSFF, which by the way is not 1 form factor either).
All of the above is a concept I called “LEGOs for Backplanes” on 1 of the other threads where the 45 Homelabs Team was soliciting feedback on their future backplane designs. I know a lot of us would be really excited to see what the 45 Homelabs Mad Scientists could bring to life there.
So for anyone interested in joining the community discussion and ideas around what we’d like to see from the 45 Homelabs in terms of Backplanes, please come join our thread where we discuss the idea of 45 Homelabs building us “LEGOs for Backplanes.”
As I understand it, this would be on their next gen cases and maybe even retrofitted to the HL15 v1.0 given that the HL15’s backplane is upgradeable and removable. That said, this is all speculative at this point. So if you like the idea, then please go upvote it so the team over at 45 Homelabs knows what you’d like to see them build for us next.
IMHO, the LEGO Backplane idea is an idea that is both very elegant and yet could also very flexibly scale up and down in terms of both cost and functionality. Thus it would serve the diverse set of users and the diverse set of use cases that we all are.