Hi @fabianm,
Welcome to the forum, I am Vikram Solanki, Ecommerce Coordinator for our 45HomeLab Division.
Thank you for considering our HL15, and unfortunately, we do not sell the backplane only. Our basic build is the HL15 chassis and backplane. and you can find our build options at 45HomeLab Store.
Hi,
thank you for the reply.
Is there a particular reason why you donāt sell parts separately?
Best
If you are in the US you can buy used Supermicro server chassis and parts for pretty cheap off of ebay. Look for bare 2U 12 bay or 3U 16 bay models. You can also buy just the backplanes off of ebay, but Iām not sure what would be needed to McGyver one into your own case.
Yea, I was already looking through eBay, but I am in Austria and the market for used equipment is not that good here. Additionally, the HL15 is way better suited for home installs, regarding depth, layout, PSU compatibility and so forth.
I already have 12 HDDs + 4 SSDs installed in a fractal design case, but I feel itās time to move to a more professional system. Since I already have some other 19" deviceās and organization becomes more important. This is why the HL15 is the logical choice for me.
Guess I have to save a bit before proceeding.
If youāve maxed out a Freactal Design there arenāt a lot of other options. Rosewill and Chenbro make rack mountable storage chassis, but they typically donāt get great reviews.
There are other ways you could expand what you have, like a USB-C or Thunderbolt JBOD, but it sounds like your concern is more around getting what you have into a rack than needing to expand it.
One other question you can ask yourself, though, is do you really need all that data available 24x7? Perhaps you have a workload where you can split the data across two boxes and have one of them powered down when not needed. I just bring this up because electricity cost seems to be a concern in Europe. Not sure what it is exactly there, but I think Austria is in the top 20 most expensive. Having everything in one place can be convenient, but also relatively expensive if youāre only using a small fraction of it at a time. You may be doing data intensive research, or have a large household, I donāt know.
Exactly, I run the family NAS, Backups + Webapps in SCALE and some other small things too. The spinners are only 4TB and will be replaced eventually for more efficient ones. And I actually have 2 as cold spare.
All the applications are on the SSDs, and the idle consumption is not too bad. But you are right, power consumption is a concern.
It is more an organizing task then strictly necessary to move to a server case, since I donāt plan to expand the server (famous last words). And before I get a used case, I would just leave it as it is.
Hi Vikram,
just an update and a big thanks to you guys for the help with my order, yesterday i received my HL 15 in one piece. the packaging holds up the journey to the Netherlands 
the shipping was so fast the paint was still a little bit sticky when i unboxed the chassis 
now iām waiting on some last parts and then i can build it 
Hey @Suukerjunk,
I am happy that you have received your unit, and hope the parts find their way to you as fast as your HL15 did. I am very excited to read more on how you set up your HL15 - I hope you will share your journey with us! Iām certain you will achieve the very best.
Fan filters.
Small item, big impact. Only thing I have to add to the conversation
Something that got me was the rail size. It wasnāt obvious on the website that it ships with 26" rails. I just assumed that because the chassis is 20" deep, it would come with the shorter rails. It would be awesome if you offered the choice of different sizes, so for those of us with shallower racks, we can purchase the 20" rails directly from you.
Hey @wizord,
Thank you for your valuable feedback. We have added the shorter rails to the store here. (45HomeLab Store), but they are currently not included in the add-ons section. I will make sure to get this corrected ASAP.
Hey @Specter,
Thank you for your feedback. I am looking into this and trying to find the perfect product for our HL15. We will definitely update you as soon as we get this up on the store.
If one purchases 1 (or more) HL15ās, can they then purchase a spare backplane?
One of the reasons Iāve always chosen Supermicro historically is thanks to the availability of such options - I have two of their 743AC chassis (along with one other 743, but different config), and keep a spare 8 bay backplane on hand in case the built in one eventually fails, just so I donāt have to wait days (or even weeks; if covid taught me anything, itās that I should never assume parts will be available when I need em!) with all of my services and tech our household and extended families depend upon being out of commission for the duration.
I understand that you may not wish to sell it on the store directly, but if a user were to buy one of the chassis, would 45drives provide a path/option for the user to purchase spares of the proprietary components? Backplane and fan controller I think are all there is in that regard, correct?
I decided to rewrite my post to be more specific with my feedbackā¦
ā¢ I hoping 45Homelab expands their offering into a broader spectrum of āprototypingā platforms/systems.
ā¢ Benefits from a cross over of development in fast storage and hybrid back planes for example is of interest, at least for me.
ā¢ So as an exampleā¦ I am looking to build a system for prototyping and reinforcement learning model development. My estimated requirements for this system is 450k IOPS at 4k per IO (~1.6GB/sec) and allowing for 20% headroom.
I like the form factor and some of the features of the 1U Mi4 chassis but would like to change to a different board, CPU - possibly the Intel Core i9-12900K or AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, GPU like the NVIDIA RTX 3080, 64GB DDR4-3200, 1TB O/S stack, 2 TB App Stack. Cooling and power supply to match.
I am new on the hardware side so donāt shame meā¦ lol.
Hey @BVD ,
I understand that you are looking to buy the backplane as a backup for your unit. I will bring this up with our team, and I will get back to you once I hear anything.
Hey @SnappingTurtle,
Thank you for your feedback, I have forwarded this to our team.
Just thought to check back in on this to see if thereād been any decisions made on this front as of yet?
Understanding that technical implementation of systems and/or processes may take some time to develop, Iām more just wanting to confirm whether or not this is something that 45Drives is generally amicable to the idea of.
To be clear, Iām hoping that 45Drives will have a method by which a user is enabled to purchase a secondary/backup component for any of the very few proprietary parts in their HL15 (backplane / fan controller). Just thinking from a business ownerās perspective, I can understand we wouldnāt want to generally sell all parts piecemeal, as this could enable copycats to build knock-off units which would both damage the brand, as well as have potentially significant financial impacts. Thinking as a customer though, I feel I should be able to have any component Iād need to repair my system on hand, not requiring any wait for shipping/RMA, etc - of course Iāll have to pay for this, but I should at least have an option.
It doesnāt seem like these are mutually exclusive, and thereāre a number of ways this could be handled thatād both work to protect the 45Drives business and employees livelihoods, while still empowering the customer to maintain uptime for their household services.
Basicallyā¦ I canāt have my kiddos / parents / wife unable to access their favorite movies and shows for multiple days/weeks, and need a way to mitigate the possibility of that happening 
Not to downplay your request, but any IT department/business that concerned about downtime has a backup/failover server. Perhaps some hot-swap items like drives on the shelf, but if they have backplanes and motherboards and such on the shelf it is because they are running tens or hundreds of the same server and is in-addition-to not instead-of backup servers. Maybe you need to think about investing in a second unit that is identical to, or a subset of (slower CPU, less drive space, less RAM, etc) your main one that can be brought up as a failover if your main server fails.
Iād not disagree if this were a revenue generating device - in my case, this is specifically for bulk storage and playback of all the familyās media content, and duplicating all of that simply isnāt realistic.
This is a situation where a few hours (certainly less, but just for the sake of discussion here) of downtime to replace a backplane is easily accepted and dealt with, but a week or more to get something shipped in is simply more headache than I want to deal with (in calls/texts/etc asking āhey, it says the server is down?!ā) when I can spend a few bucks to have the parts needed on hand.
Sure, if the house gets taken out by a tornado/flood, then everything on that host is toast, but at that point, itāll be the least of my worries lol
I donāt think itās unreasonable to ask that any proprietary component I might need to fix the system be available for ordering in order to avoid tanking the spouse approval factor
Iām not sure if this has been brought up or not, but I would buy a HL8 8-bay server in a heartbeat (money factor not in play)