HL8 Pre Purchase Questions

Hello everyone,

I’m a new member of the Homelab community and I’m passionate about learning about technology. I’m considering purchasing the 45 Homelab HL8 fully assembled as my primary file server. I have a few questions for you.

  • Since the HL8 will be my main file server, would you recommend upgrading the processor from the Ryzen 5 to the Ryzen 7?

  • I have several devices with 10GB network cards installed inside them. Has anyone installed an SFP+ network card on their HL8?

  • I’m undecided between buying the unit with the acrylic panel on the front verses the standard panel. However, I’m worried about potential airflow problems if I remove the Noctua fans that come with the standard panel. Has anyone encountered any issues with airflow or cooling the unit?

I appreciate your time and effort in helping me find the best solution for my needs.

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Serving files isn’t a particularly CPU intensive task. You would need to provide some more details about your workload and/or use case. How many osers? Do you plan to run virtual machines or containers? If so, how many? doing what tasks? Do you plan to edit files directly off the server?

The 5700G will give you about a 20% performance boost over the 5500GT. That may or may not be worth the additional $115 depending on your use case. If you are frugal, looking briefly at US street prices, the delta seems to currently be more like $70, so you could save a few dollars doing an upgrade yourself if you need a more powerful CPU.

This shouldn’t be an issue if you don’t need the PCIe slot for something else like a GPU.

Why would you buy the standard panel and remove the fans? My understanding is the acrylic panel (and thus a rear fan only) provides less airflow and the unit runs hotter than with the metal front (and front fans).

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I ended up doing a custom build in the HL8 with Acrylic front which I detailed in the post linked below. Although I went for some upgrades, I also reused anything I could from the HL8 full build part list. This might give you some idea of what to expect temperature wise.

As mentioned, I went with the “Pro Max” build I outlined with a Ryzen 5 5600 plus five (5) Seagate Exos X14 12TB hard drives.

My HL8 Noctua fans are as follows with idle system:

  • Fan 1: Case (2x 120mm): 900 RPM
  • Fan 2: Case (1x 40mm): 2400 RPM
  • Fan 3: CPU (1x 90mm): 1400 RPM

And here are some of the temps I currently have at idle:

  • CPU: 37C
  • X570: 61C
  • MOBO: 39C
  • HDD: 37-40C

I have a few other observations I’ve had regarding the fans and the case:

  1. The smaller Noctua 40mm on the front of the case does very little in the way of the cooling. I was hoping I could use to help with the X570 chipset but I really have the crank the RPM’s up to around 4000 RPM’s to get any benefit. At that level, the fan is distinctly audible with a pitch higher than the other fans. I found I really need to keep it under 3000 rpm unless the system is under full load for an extended period of time.
  2. Even while running an extended stress test, my system does not thermal throttle and keeps max turbo speeds. CPU temperature is then reaching into the mid-80’s. The caveat here is that all the fans at that point are pretty much running at full speed to maintain keep it going like that.
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As of now, the plan is to use the HL8 to store files centrally instead of having multiple copies of the file on multiple computers. I don’t anticipate having many users connecting to the HL8 at this time. However, I might experiment with virtual machines and containers in the future. I plan to work from the server when doing my media work, as everyone will have access to the latest file version.

I wouldn’t remove the fans from the standard panel. I was referring to the acrylic panel, it seems like you lose the two fans in the front.

Well from that description I’d just go with the 5500GT and save some money for a future upgrade. For some comparison, the Passmark score for the base CPU offered with the HL15 is 1/4 that of the 5500GT, and they run that as a dual 10G file server just fine. $115 isn’t a lot of money for most people, and more CPU headroom is always better, but my analysis would be that the AM4 socket used by the HL8 motherboard is now “last generation”, so any future upgrade I did, if I did get heavily into workloads that required more compute, would be to a new motherboard like AM5 or intel equivalent, and not just a same socket CPU upgrade. I’d save my money for that rather than going up the CPU stack on AM4 at this point.

With the acrylic panel, my understanding is you don’t “lose” fans, but the fans are moved from the front to the back of the drive cage. Pushing air across the drives vs pulling air across the drives. I thought I had seen something from 45HL themselves saying the acrylic panel version ran hotter, but I can’t find that now, so it may just be my imagianation. Personally, I’m not a fan of either front panel with the big “45”.

This is correct. The two fans form the front are moved to the rear of the case and the backplane is mounted to extended stand offs to push the board forward and make room for this.

@rymandle05 thanks for sharing your post, you definitely have a nice setup you put together!

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Thank you @DigitalGarden for the feedback, it definitely helped me.

Have you reached out to 45 Homelab for any support?

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Hey @spicy,

I apologize for the inconvenience, I understand the frustration. I hope the service technician is helping you out to solve this. Kindly send me an email on info@45homelab.com with the current update so that I can do my best to resolve this for you.

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@Vikram-45HomeLab , @Buck was the user having issues, not @spicy . But they have since deleted the post that @spicy quoted. You might want to PM @Buck to see if he got things sorted.

Hey @DigitalGarden,

Thank you for bringing that to my notice, I will reach out to @Buck

I have all eight disk slots populated, and airflow is a serious issue. There’s no space between the disks for air to move from the front to the rear of the case, causing disk temperatures to reach 54°C—far from ideal for long-term reliability. I expected better design from a company specializing in storage servers for years. Adding fans on top would have been a much better solution.

Additionally, using slim 15mm fans instead of standard 25mm fans only makes things worse. It’s hard to understand why they didn’t just add 10mm to the case depth to accommodate proper fans. I’m actually considering replacing this case with a cheaper Chinese alternative because of these flaws. Of course, I could increase the fan speed to improve cooling, but that would make the system uncomfortably loud.

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This might sound stupid but are you running enterprise or consumer type hard drives? Also is your HL8 in a open rack/ shelf or enclosed?

Almost all the disks are Seagate IronWolf 8TB, with the HL8 on an open shelf. Previously, I used a Fractal Design Define R5 case, which isn’t the best in terms of thermal performance. However, even in that case, disk temperatures remained around 40°C.

Is your HL8 with the standard or the acrylic panel? Also have you tried to reach out to their support for any help with the issue and if so what was the end result.

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My have the standard front panel. I don’t think there’s any point in reaching out to support, as there’s nothing they can do. The case’s thermal design simply isn’t suitable for eight disks. That’s about 80 watts of heat, and the tiny slots in the front panel aren’t enough for slim fans to pull air through. Plus, there are no spaces between the disks for airflow. Altogether, this creates a very poor cooling solution.