45Drives HL8 - attractive smaller hardware option?

General Discussion
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1

Courtesy of this (sponsored) video:

I became aware of the 45Drives HL8 server, currently in presale status:
https://store.45homelab.com/presale/hl8

Looks pretty attractive for an eight-bay unit, particularly knowing that they’ll have 2.5" bays available as well. Compares pretty favorably in price to the UGREEN 8-bay unit[1], IMO, presuming the latter’s MSRP is its actual street price. Advantages I see compared to UGREEN:

  • $100 cheaper
  • Heftier CPU
  • More RAM (16 GB vs. 8 GB)
  • ECC RAM
  • Much easier access to system internals
  • Onboard WiFi (not a factor for TrueNAS, which doesn’t support it, but might be a favorable point for some people)
  • 2.5" bays are separate, in addition to the 8x 3.5" bays
    • …and while they’re optional, they’ll be releasing 3D-printable files for those who (like me) have 3D printers
  • PCIe x16 slot available
  • Available as just a chassis, or chassis + PSU, for those who want a different ITX motherboard
  • For those who are tired of everything being made in China; the chassis “is designed, manufactured, and assembled in North America.”

Drawbacks:

  • Only one, Realtek, 2.5 GbE NIC, vs. 2x 10 GbE NICs on the UGREEN
  • No Thunderbolt
  • Limited m.2 expansion
    • The UGREEN has a m.2 boot SSD semi-buried in the chassis, plus two user-accessible m.2 slots
    • The HL8 has two m.2 slots, one of which is used for a boot device and the second of which is used for a SATA controller
  • Subjective, but the HL8 doesn’t look as polished. Rugged, no doubt, but seems a little rough around the edges. Granted, the photos and video I’m seeing are preproduction units, but that also seems to be 45Drives’ aesthetic
  • The PCIe slot supports bifurcation, but only to 8x8 or 8x4x4.

While this isn’t really a budget option, I don’t see a whole lot of options for desktop 8-bay chassis. This one looks a little bigger than UGREEN’s, but still pretty compact for what it is. I don’t have any affiliation with 45Drives or with the YT host; just thought this might be of interest here.

  1. which otherwise seems like the best option for a prebuilt server to run TrueNAS, other than the TrueNAS Mini and other systems iX provides ↩︎

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Looks tasty. I’m not super convinced that the drives get amazing cooling but the vertical arrangement with the two fans on top may be adequate. Certainly a lot better than my old MiniXL.

I still much prefer the Lian Li Q26A over this rig though on account of even more space between drives, fewer drives per fan, a few more bays, and a bit more redundancy re: fans. Also, a standard ATX PSU combined with any Mini-ITX motherboard you can cram in there, though at a higher up-front cost and now unobtainium availability.

That said, the uniform slots in this rig may be more efficient at ensuring cooling vs. the weird round holes that Lian Li blessed its hard drive tower with. With the right fans, this rig may perform very well due to less turbulence, little to no opportunity for a boundary layer, lower likelyhood of air bypassing the drives. I’d love to see its real life performance with a scrub rather than just commentary.

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Nor am I; moving enough air over that many drives to cool them adequately takes a bit of doing and usually makes a bit of noise. My 6-bay UGREEN NAS is marginal in that regard. I’ll speculate that it does OK, but probably not quite as well as we’d like.

The other problem is Mini-ITX–suitable server motherboards in that form factor aren’t easy to find. The only one I found from Supermicro that really fits is one of their X11SDV models, but that’s a $1400 motherboard. Dual Intel 10 GbE onboard, as well as 8x SATA ports and IPMI, put it a good bit ahead of the Gigabyte board used in the HL8, but at a cost delta over $1k, it ought to. Haven’t gone through ASRock’s line yet though.

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Agreed, I had a look through applicable mini-itx lineups at AsRock, Tyan, Gigabyte, and SM. Of those, AsRock and SM usually had the best availability in the marketplace. I found a couple that I can dig up later which combined onboard SFP+ and a decent number of SATA, Oculink, etc. connectors.

I focused on SFP+ boards as being able to add more drives later via a LSI card is easier than finding a mini ITX board with oodles of SATA connectors but no SFP+. I also try to avoid copper 10GbE since it runs hot, has a short range, and is $$ compared to fiber.

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Likewise, though if I can put it close to a switch, I can use a RJ45 SFP+ module.

I’ve seen media converters for GbE; I wonder if they exist (and if so, how much they cost) for 10 GbE. Ah, of course they do. Kind of pricey, though:

As long as you don’t need to go over 100 km…

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Of all the units available at Wiredzone, the Super Micro a2sdi-h-tp4f still makes the most sense to me, even if it’s PciE 3.0x4 slot is gelded. Decent power, 12 SATA ports, 2 SFP+, etc. Only downside is price. (FWIW, It’s kind of hilarious that the motherboard search function by feature at wiredzone is heads and shoulders above that of Super Micro).

The Gigabyte MB10-DS4 is arguably the best deal out there even if the DS3 version of the MB10-DS motherboard series is more desirable due to it having a SFP+ vs. copper 10GbE. For whatever reason, buying Gigabyte boards in general seems nigh impossible. The DS3 version is being offered used on eBay for $10,000 with a $500 discount (and no, that is not a typo).

Super Micro has a similar board to the MB10-DS4, the X10SDV-4C-TLN2F, at a similar price point. Given Super Micros reputation, availability in the states, and personal experience I’d probably prefer that over the MB10-DS4.

Either of those boards would require a LSI HBA for larger disk arrays since both are limited to 6 drives on board.

A truly bonkers board (though again with copper 10GbE) is the Asrock Rack X570D4I-2T. It’ll take many types of Ryzen CPUs, can address 9 SATA drives via Oculink, and offers a single PCIe 4x16 slot. It’s arguably the most advanced board of the lot. The board is around $400, you have a choice of CPUs to suit your use needs, etc. The only downside is Asrock Rack. It’s an OEM that works well enough for resellers like iXsystems, but end-users like us have been treated pretty unevenly by AsRock (see AVR54 bug response by SM vs. AsRock vs. iXsystems).

For a simple backup server, the older Atom rig rules and that’s likely why iXsystems is using that series of motherboards in its current mini series, no?

But for a sub-9 HDD server, the AsRock Rack is likely the best technical solution since it has a upgradable processor, oodles of built-in SATA ports via Oculink, and a PCIe 4.0x16 slot for just about any future expansion need. Whether you want to add a Graphics card or a quad-furcated NVME SSD stack for a 4-way sVDEV, the AsRock motherboard has you covered.

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That looks like a really nice option. Price isn’t that bad, can handle all the drives the HL8 will hold, ECC (though IIRC ECC SODIMMs aren’t too easy to find), IPMI, onboard m.2 for a boot device, up to 128 GB of RAM, dual Intel 10 GbE. Converting 10GBaseT to SFP+ isn’t that hard, though the device to do it is a little pricey (I paid less for my last Ruckus managed switch).

And that board, plus the same CPU/RAM/cooler 45Drives uses for their complete unit, is very close in cost to the cost delta between their chassis + PSU and their complete unit. That sounds like a winner. You lose WiFi, but that shouldn’t be an issue for a server.

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Yup, the only memory I’d use with the X570D4I-2T, is the M474A4G43MB1-CTDQ 32GB module from Samsung listed in the AsRock QVL list. It is about $110 new or $88 for a ‘compatible’ knock-off. I doubt the ECC RAM options for the other boards are a lot cheaper?

Looked into the SM Atom board, the cost seems comparable, i.e. $110 for a branded 32GB stick on the QVL list.

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Using the AM4 socketed X570D4I-2T today may be okay. But AM5 has been out at least a year as far as I know. To be fair to AMD, they did release 2 new AM4 CPUs this summer, and they have a proven track record of supporting a CPU socket far longer than a certain other company, (okay, I’ll say it, Intel).

And yes, large ECC SO-DIMMs for DDR5 are available:

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This is an absolute breeze compared with the PSU! In Flex-ATX size at this wattage and rating or above I see a choice between the proposed Silverstone, the FlexGURU PRO FSP500-50FDB and… nothing else.

Beside the price, Xeon D-2100 idle around 60W. I’m not confident that case is suitable to cool that. Note that 45Drives uses low TDP Ryzen APU: A X11SDV would output as much heat at idle as a HL8 in default configuration under full load. Hm…
Reasonably[1], that leaves a choice between A2SDi boards (8-12 SATA, x4 slot, possible 10 GbE) and an AsRock Rack X570D4I-2T with a low TDP Ryzen CPU for more computing power (9 SATA, x16 slot with possible x4x4x4x4 for a small NVMe array).

But at an eye-watering $599 for the chassis and backplane, it makes a second-hand Lian-Li Q26 at 300 € look like an absolute bargain[2]…
Compared with a Fractal Design Node 804 (10 drives, with screws, standard ATX PSU and micro-ATX board), one is paying an awful lot for direct access to the drive bays and a more compact form factor.
A Jonsbo N3 fits the same 8 drives and mini-ITX board, plus a standard PSU for a third of the prize. You really have to hate the “Made in China” sticker.

I could not find an AM5 server motherboard in mini-ITX size.

  1. I wouldn’t waste the sole PCIe slot for a HBA, so anything with less than 8 SATA ports is out. ↩︎

  2. which it certainly is. I love this case. ↩︎

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Yes, the single, (in 3 varieties), small ASRock Rack AMD AM5 server board is Deep Mini-ITX, which may not fit the the 45Drives HL8 case. On the other hand, that added length gets us regular DIMM slots. Not the SO-DIMMs use in X570D4I-2T. And one variety that has 10Gbit/ps Ethernet built in, (though Broadcom chipset).

New AMD AM5 Mini-ITX boards will likely be released over the life of socket AM5. It is still early days.

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These “deep mini-ITX” boards (which I cannot find on sale) perfectly illustrate the issue with mini-ITX: It’s just too small for DIMM slots and the amount of I/O that modern CPUs can expose. Another clever trick of these is to apparently do without a B650 chipset but to expose the four lanes of the chipset link as a second M.2 slot from the CPU—the not-so-welcome consequence for potential NAS use is that AM5D4I boards have no SATA connectivity at all.

The upcoming (“Preliminary”) AM5D4I2 will have 2xi210 NICs: Just fine for TrueNAS. But the “deep” part will still essentially require a micro-ATX-capable case to fit in—at which point one can just go for an AsRock Rack B650D4U or Gigabyte MC13-LE0/LE1.
I’m unsure whether any other manufacturer will step in to offer an AM5 server board in true mini-ITX size. Sure, there are many consumer AM5 mini-ITX boards, but without IPMI and with questionable ECC support.

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I like focusing on stuff I can buy now as opposed focusing on stuff I might buy in the future, if various motherboard manufacturers get around to actually offering motherboards with said chip sockets.

The AM4 socket is plenty performant, ditto the chip universe one can choose from. Even very low power configs are possible with the -G sub variants available on eBay vs. the more common -x types that aren’t apparently as good at throttling themselves. The -GE version has a slightly slower base clock (3.4 vs. 3.9GHz) but the turbo clock is the same (4.4GHz), ditto cores/cache/etc and the TDP of the 5650GE is only 35W vs. 65W. For a small NAS, the GE version likely makes more sense, especially since 3.4GHz is plenty fast for a small file server.

From a rust file server POV, SM has pretty much abandoned the mini-itx form factor with the exception of the atom board. Also note the clever use of Oculink by gigabyte for their mini-ITX board - i.e. how to expose a lot of lanes for SATA OR NVME flash applications despite working within the constraints of mini-ITX. SM could have done that also with it’s D-series or Ryzen offerings but chose not to.

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God I love hardware talk.

I don’t mean to steal anyone’s thunder here from the sponsored OP, but in terms of small cases that have lots of drive capacity with minimal mods I have to recommend this one:

This thing is metal framed, very durable and quite small for the amount of drives it can hold. 19.7 x 7.5 x 16.7 inch.

I have (12) 3.5" rust spinners in mine, plust a 2.5" boot SSD and two M2 slots used on my B550. I did have to mod the 5.25" bay to accommodate the (3) 3.5" drives going in there as well as mount the last drive vertically on the back side of the main cage. There are a ton of nice ready-to-eat options on amazon to do just that for cheap for the 5.25". I used this one but you can do better than me. Probably cringe for you hot swap loving guys with Lian-Li budgets for cases, but its small, solid and quiet. Not a single drive ever goes over 35C (max) in the entire multi year use case of this and the mean 25C over 12 drives. YMMV

Capture
Capture757×560 202 KB

Just thought I’d point this little baby out. For $75 its a steal for a large drive NAS case.

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No, the OP (which was mine) isn’t sponsored in any way. The video I linked to, which is not mine, is sponsored.

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My apologies. I saw (Sponsored) in the first post and I didn’t want to be the smart alec reply guy. I do think naming a computer case “45Drives” is similar to McDonalds purportedly calling their cardboard manufacturer “100% Beef” in terms of mental misdirection. I looked at case thinking immediately “How the heck do they fit 45 HDD’s in that?!?!”. :slight_smile:

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Their original product was a 4U chassis that held, you guessed it, 45 drives. They’ve since branched out.

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A big takeaway from this whole thread is that the long pro-ECC ram campaign by TrueNas is losing steam, and strategically retreating it appears. Case in point is the OP link that doesn’t permit ECC ram with the offered CPU’s.

Personally I like these threads. Let it be clearly stated that I think its great we are made aware of cool new server parts, hardware, etc here. 100% Rep+ great thread. I have very weakly held and non-passionate views about the need for ECC ram in home servers.

I’m just old enough to remember when the TrueNas die-hards would, with tone and language that would make a standup comedian cry, hound out anybody who even DARED to bring non-ecc Ram within a zip code of a self respecting Truenas system.

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OK. My bad. Its a good name for a server chassis builder I will concede.

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I’m confused. The Ryzen 5650GE can be used with ECC RAM per this website just as the 5650G allegedly too. Ditto the motherboard I linked to. Did I miss something?