I haven’t read all the posts in this thread (it’s gotten very long over time), but there are some things that I would like to see in the store, and these things are based on my need and desire to keep the noise of my future HL15 unit in check:
In addition to Enterprise HDDs offer some NAS HDDs, such as the Seagate IronWolf Pro or the WD Red Pro series. For the capacities that I checked their noise level was below that of an Enterprise HDD. I know I can buy such HDDs in many other places, but one service you might be able to offer is to mix HDDs from different batches for a purchase of multiple drives. Also I’d trust you much more to ship them in a properly packaged than I would amazon or newegg or some such place.
I do not have my HL15 yet (still contemplating, which specs to buy), but one thing I’m already looking at is to buy some acoustic damping material, since I suspect that the metal case will unfortunately be a strong reflector of HDD vibration noise and of fan noise. Offering such material in a form factor precut for the HL15 (and perhaps even as a pre-built option, might be of interest to those homelabbers, who have to keep their unit near them.
I think someone on the interwebs tried this and there was no effect. Not sure if I can find the post. Depending on what sort of noise level you are going for I think the Noctua upgrade could be enough. But tbh a silent build is only going to happen with SSDs and water cooling.
I’m not really interested in a totally silent build, but in a reasonably quiet build. Perhaps I’m thinking too much ahead and shouldn’t worry about that, until I have the unit. But it would be cool to see those results, so if you could find that post, that would be great.
I don’t know what their fan setup was, if it was the stock fans and full build or something else, but note this is before the Noctua kit was available for purchase…
Tagging on to this, I’d also like to see more replacement or updated parts added to the webstore in general. For instance, I have the Rev 1 HL15 with the pop out PCIe brackets. I wouldn’t mind having the reusable ones that came with later revisions.
We do not have any plans to add the backplane as a product on the store. We offer to sell these to the customers who needs them to replace their backplane.
I would really love to be able to buy the Backplane that all the hard drives slot into. Older 45 and 60 hard drives cases are starting to hit the market and being able to buy these would give these old cases a excellent second life.
I assume you’ve seen the thread here about upgrading an old storage pod. Physically, the current backplane won’t work with the old pods, the screw holes and spacing of the SATA connectors don’t match. It might be interesting 45HL helped produce, market or distribute the PCB developed in that thread. I’m not sure how many different versions of the PCB might need to exist to support the different versions of the pods before the switch to the current backplanes.
Even if it was sold as a kit where you had to dill new holes and remove standoffs I’m positive most of us in the tinkering community would be more than willing to spend quality time to make them fit properly. But i guess right now that is just food for thought.
What’s the gouge on ECC these days. 30 years ago, we wanted it in our servers and workstations. And before that, in minicomputers. I’ve actually had to replace failed memory in a Sun 4/330. It was interesting – ran fine until you started NEWS – shifting the console from text to graphics and trap, kernel panic, replace this SIM screened as Uxxx – Nice.
I’ve not seen a memory error in probably 10 system years of TrueNAS service on ECC hardware here at home. And I live in a brick house to double the odds of a stray cosmic ray or radium daughter doing the deed.
Anyway, I’ve tried a couple of times to shop for motherboards with ECC for a home brew server only to fail miserably. Throw in the towel and buy another TrueNAS box.
Only SuperMicro made it easy. The others – run PC Part Picker then go to OEM motherboard page to confirm that it actually did ECC – that it was a supported feature.
And today, I stopped by Crucial.com. Their memory selector no longer offers ECC as an option.
I’d suggest offering ECC motherboards and memory for those who want them and curated CPUs and APUs in various thermal design power ratings.
And those skinny disk cables the OEMs are using.
And skinny fans for boxes that can’t take the standard fan.