My HL15 is full! Any suggestions?

Hardware
1

As the title says, my HL15 is full, or at least uncomfortably close to it with less than 10% remaining..

Is there a way to attach more drives? I bought the v1 Fully Built and tested option.

I don’t want to swap the drives out for larger ones as I already have 24TB drives.

Any rumours that 45HomeLab will bring out an HL30 / HL45?

2

45HL has repeatedly said thay have no intent to release something bigger than 15 HDDs for the prosumer market. You would need to engage the enterprise side for that. If you can’t go with bigger drives your options would seem to be:

  • Get a quote from 45Drives on a Q30. See if they’ll quote you a price for just the chassis. It’ll be expensive, but you’ve defined your needs.
  • Look for a used Q30/S45/XL60 on eBay. These come up occasionally and I think there are currently 2 or 3 listed. You have to be careful about the generation though depending on your use case.
  • Get a 24 or 36 drive used Supermicro chassis off of eBay. It’ll be noisy.
  • Look into external JBODs like ones from NetApp, again likely off of eBay
  • Look into building this external shelf project someone posted on YouTube;
    A Disk Shelf Project
  • Look into buying a second HL15 chassis-only and setting it up as a JBOD like I did for a while when I was creating a backup server;
    HL15 Tinman Simple JBOD Expansion

Finally, you might want to analyze your usage pattern, Do you really need 360TB+ all online in the same box? You could probably just buy a second HL15 and partition your workload across the two. For example, I have my personal media on one, and my professional stuff on the other. With an external JBOD you have to be a bit careful to not corrupt your ZFS pool(s).

3

Thanks for your response!

I had not seen 45HL say they have no intent to release anything bigger than 15 HDDs for the prosumer market, so will take that on board.

I did get a quotation from 45Drives for a Q30 chassis back in 2024, which was within budget. However, having never built my own server before, I asked them if the parts I planned on using would work for an Unraid Jellyfin setup. I was told that if I wanted consultation advice from one of the experts on their team it would cost around $1,850, so I gave up on that idea.

Since then I have looked on ebay but never found a second hand 30 or 45 bay unit. Perhaps the ones you mention being available now don’t show up for me as I would want shipping to Asia.

I had hoped to keep everything on one server, but perhaps the answer is to split my media into TV and Films and put each on a separate HL15. I will have to look into this further.

I would certainly like to use another 45D or 45HL chassis. My HL15 is fantastic!

Thanks again for your input. :folded_hands:

4

If you haven’t built a server before the questions wouldn’t really be around the software, it would be around power and data for the 30 drives, I’d probably have them include the PSU. I think the internals of your HL15 would go in a Q30 if you have an additional PCIe slot available..You’d likely need a second HBA, or a SAS expader, to connect the second set of 15 drives.

Asking a one-off seller in the US to ship to Asia is probably a stretch, so yes, you are likely filtering listings, or eBay is. I’m not saying a lot come up, but every few months or so there is a 45Drives/Storinator unit listed. Currently there is a Q30 with some drives that seems way overpriced, often they are S45 or XL60s.

Example Listing 1
Example Listing 2
Example Listing 3

Your power bill would be a bit higher running two motherboards/CPUs instead of just one.

If it was me, and;

  • I was unsure about building in a Q30 chassis
  • Did not want to purchase a fully built Q30
  • Had Unraid as my use case

I think I would look at buying one of the new X15 Unraid systems, setting that up as my main system and then either making the HL15 v1 the system for less frequently used media, or turning it into a disk shelf for the X15 as I did in the project above. If Jellyfin is your main gateway, I think if you had two full systems the fact that some of the media is on one box and some on the other should be transparent. You should either be able to point to multiple network locations from Jellyfin config, or set up NFS or SMB shares to access the other media from the one a single Jellyfin instance is running on.

1 Like
5

Thank you so much for your detailed reply. I really do appreciate you taking the time to share your wisdom and experience.

That 60 bay chassis is seriously tempting, and would certainly give me enough headroom (!) - but I will have a think about your suggestion to get one of the X15 Unraid systems and set it up to share work with HL15 v1

The big bonus for me with the X15 approach is that it comes with an i7, so any transcoding works out of the box, whereas the XL60 leaves me completely baffled about how to spec it out!

Thank you again. :folded_hands:

6

I think Unraid has a limit of 30 drives for the parity array (unless you’re LTT), so if one of the core requirements is to continue using Unraid, I think looking at chassis with more than 30 drives is probably something you aren’t going to be able to utilize.