Just received my HL15 Beast and I have some observations in the wild that might improve a later revision of it.
Prevent the front fan wires from entering the fan filter space. My fan filter was blocked by a fan connector, had to remove the front fan mounts to reposition the wire in order to get the fan filter back in place. Would benefit from extending the fan mount bracket to prevent the wires from entering that space.
Really should have the top cover of the chassis in two parts, one over the motherboard area and a much smaller one that can be removed (or just flipped up) to service the drives without having to pull the whole entire chassis out of the rack.
Minimum rack depth measurements on the store page for the rails when looking at the storage chassis (there’s an “up to” but no minimum).
Rear fan mounting holes above the IO shield, there’s an awful lot of empty space there that could be actively shuttling hot air out.
I think the drive retention clips were tested thoroughly, there’s gouges in them.
Some QC issues (can post pictures if desired) at the rear of the chassis near the screwdriver channels. Just cosmetic as far as I can tell though.
PCIe slot screw holes are a bit low. Screwing cards in all the way pulls the fingers out of the back of the PCIe slot. Hard to strike a balance between secured, loose, and card installed correctly.
They have this on the enterprise servers. I got the impression, although I’ve never seen it stated anywhere, that it was one of the areas they reduced cost for the HL designs.
There are details about other components like the motherboard, case fans CPU coolers, PSU, etc..that they don’t explicitly list on the store pages for the servers. They give us model numbers and expect us to be savvy enough to research relevant specs. It is easy enough to get the minimum depth of the MCP-290-00053-0N rails from the 45HL store page specific to it, or from Supermicro’s web site.
That’s maybe fair though I do wonder how much it reduces cost compared to serviceability gained. It’s not like it’s a cheap chassis.
For sure, there are just other areas of the store where they give the minimum length for other rail kit models. Just drawing attention to it because it’s an easy fix, a value add, and would bring it into alignment with other areas of their store.
Maybe but that’s awfully fiddly for such an expensive chassis. I have the chassis that I have at this point, I’m just pointing out areas of improvement that might save people grief in future revisions.
The case exists in a weird place and I question if they fully understand the people that are going to be buying these. For the company; it’s the bargain bin, cost optimized option, that absolutely should not be positioned to compete with their enterprise gear. For the people buying them, they are super niche and very expensive luxury items that a person would typically expect to have tight QC and design. I’m not overly picky (though I know plenty of people who are/would be), I bought it for the backplane… I just suspect that the backplane isn’t $1500 on the BOM and there’s probably some margin left in there to fix a few things and make the product better going forward.
Oh, I agree, these cases are expensive relative to the non-45Drives competition, and one should expect a quality product for that price. They did take user feedback in updating the HL15 v2 and creating the Beast, so I’m sure they’ll appreciate yours. I was just trying to be pragmatic.
They’ve had some issues with the backplates of these chassis before, but the top of the PCIe supports being too low is a new one. If you don’t like a workaround (another one might be lower motherboard sandoffs?) you could send some photos to info@45homelab.com showing how “off” things are and see if maybe there was a batch with issues or something.
Definitely, I totally get it and I’m not here making demands. Just observations.
If it’ll help them make improvements on it going forward (helping themselves and those that come after me), absolutely. For my case, I have no desire to take everything out and I live about as far away from the manufacturing point as possible while staying in continental North America… I have the chassis that I’m going to have lol. I’ll make it work, none of it is a deal breaker.
Would be nice to see some kind of way to vertically mount graphics cards. Using my 3090 in the case takes up quite a few PCIe slots that I would like to use for other devices. I have made my own mount that isn’t great, but does the job. I then used a PCIe riser cable to connect the card to the board, saving myself from losing 3 slots to the chunky card.
Thanks, Hutch. Keen to see what you guys come up with.
A few issues I ran into were:
Getting the mount high enough to still allow other reasonably sized cards to be used in the PCIe slots. I have two Silverstone ECM40 cards I am using for NVMe drives that I needed to fit.
Designing a bracket that secures the card firmly without applying pressure to the shroud or fans, as this can restrict fan operation.
Ensuring the bracket provides adequate support to prevent sag, while having minimal impact on the rest of the case layout.
Positioning the bracket so it still accommodates the riser cable, power connectors, and maintains sufficient airflow around the card.
Thought of another idea for the second iteration, that could also act as un upgrade for current systems. As it is the beast, it would be nice to see the integration of tri mode backplanes, either as an optional upgrade or standard. Newer boards have lots of PCIe capability and would be nice to use that for some quick storage, without relying on cards to add little m.2 drives.
