45Drives just launched their HomeLab e-store. Crazy prices and nonsensical parts

To be fair , they design and manufacture the case in canada .. so it makes sense that it'll be a little more expensive than when you get the labor done in china

And yeah when you compare it to synology , i guess you still get more bang for the buck .. but YMMV

Man, I saw 800 for the case and thought it was not bad, honestly, with the backplane. This is not from China. It's from Canada and made in country. I'm not sure what people here expected. 400 dollars? 200 dollars? 800 for the Case, and the backplane is reasonable due to where it has been manufactured. Sure, you can get another case for 200 or 300 dollars or DIY your own, then do that. China is cheap. If I hadn't built another NAS already for a truenas server, I would pull the trigger on this.

Downvote away.

I'm assuming it's because they are in Canada, and prices tend to be higher there.

They need to find a US warehouse to ship to US customers.

I always buy used NICs and HBAs off eBay, way cheaper even if I had to replace it on my dime.

I bought the full build, no sales tax/ shipping, just a 61.77 international fee. :). Definitely would not buy anything on the estore though because can just google and get it cheaper :).

It’s not cheap to operate a business in Canada

They don't know their audience

The most common reason ppl buy rackmount gear for the homelab is for training on enterprise equipment and because they find it dirt cheap on ebay. That is despite the noise and running costs.

They said they wanted to build a pickup truck. They ended up with an industrial excavator 😅.

Regular homelabbers dont buy racks and use 15 bays. In the day of 18Tb shucked drives who needs that many bays??

This whole thing is weird especially since people like geerlingguy and the self hosted people promoting it. I mean those guys use raspberry pi 4s for most of their own stuff?!

Availability. You can't get old parts forever.

I'll just go serverpartdeals/ebay...

It's too bad because I really like the idea, as there really are not much options here in Canada for this sort of thing, but holy crap they charge way too much. If they could make the 45 drive case + sas expander setup about $1,000, and then you add your own components, I think that would be a decent deal. When I built my 24 bay supermicro server about 10 years ago it ran me around 3k. Case was around $1,500 and then components around there too. Now that we lost NCIX and Tigerdirect there is nowhere to buy Supermicro stuff though.

Also isn't greeting ebay dell emc r730 server cheaper than getting this "premium storage server"? It has 8gb ram and some crappy 1.9ghz xeon

$30 for a 3D printed 2.5" to 3.5" adapter, lol. That's like 30 cents of parts and labour right there. You can even buy those made of steel for a few bucks because it's so easy to make...

I wish I had half of the wallet that 45 drives thinks I do.

I was excited for the chassis but not so much now that I saw the price. Does anyone have any recommendations for something similar?

They are recommending the 9600-16i because it is new and available. The 9400 series is older and no longer being manufactured. Anything available is either used or new-old stock.

I remember the post from 45 drives asking about what things homelab/datahoarders were interested in. Around 3 out 5 people responding mentioned pricing being important. 45 drives blew right through that stop sign.

...because 45 drives literally targets top of the line.

Their pricing assumes that homelab enthusiasts are all famous YouTubers who either get free hardware or have cash to burn. Nonsensical indeed.

Hm, all of their enterprise hard drives are SATA. Those don't support multipath...

I work for a large Entertainment company that we were looking at 45 drives and they refused to fill out normal tax paperwork for B2B and ACH as we were going to be doing continual purchases with them just not a 1 off as we have 3 petabytes of storage now with a EMC Isilion that were trying to sunset. The company i found to be polite but not grounded in reality in doing business we don't want lines of credit with them we want to pay in good old debt free money. oh well . I am glad to see I am not the only one who went WTF when looking at the HL15

Those prices are so far out of reality, compared to their MSRP counterparts from some basic online retailers selling the exact same part. Well over 2x markup in some cases (those Seagate drives, for example).

Hard pass.

lol wtf

The case alone is 800 dollars… a used super micro sever that’s 24 bays is 1600 for something with at the time of this post.

256GB ram 2 x E2630 v3s LSI 12GB controller Rack rails

Why in the hell would I pay 800 dollars for an empty case?

Personally, I don't think they're really targeting home labbers, they're really targeting home / small business (meaning <10-15 employees up to maybe 20 or so) who need the capacity, but also can't swing the true business prices.

Since someone else mentioned Jeff from Craft Computing, I'll use him as an example:

• It's a lot easier to drop money on a server (storage or otherwise) when the server itself and it's recurring costs (the power usage and the extra HVAC costs) can all be written off as business expenses.

• 45D's prices are still far cheaper than true "enterprise storage" and the headaches they come with (like the relentless sales reps you have to deal with to buy one) with most of the features they'd have (IE - Nimble or any other SAN provider in this case) minus the warranty SLA - obligatory "F@#$ you very much CDW, Dell EMC, and HP"

• On that previous point, yes, you can source parts and build it cheaper. Like any other OEM, what you really pay for is the warranty. Instead of having to deal directly with LSI, Intel or whoever because [component] failed, you call up 45D, given them the unit serial number, and go from there - as my boss likes to say "it's one throat to choke" - If that storage is vital to your business, downtime costs money squared. Again using Jeff as an example: If he's screwing with the server off camera, that's time he probably should have been on camera recording something else. If he is making a video about the issue, then it's going to take him 3 times longer than it otherwise would have to just fix it (many YouTubers have been vocal about everything taking 3 times longer for the camera than it does to just do it) and at that point, the video is being made as a piece of revenue generating content to try to help offset the cost of the downtime.

Those drive prices are absolutely absurd, too. $181 for a 4TB drive? Go fuck yourself 45Drives.

We do not know if FS is taking a loss or what their profit margin is. FS.com also sells in a MUCH higher volume and similar companies like BJ’s we don’t know what items could be loss leaders.

For the case I actually think it’s a fair price for the product. The problem is the product is not a good fit for the homelab market.

The markup on everything else is absolutely insane though.

Also competing with used gear that is going through e-recycling facilities is going to be hard for them.

They made a good product but missed the mark imo.

I checked the prices on a few of the SSDs on CDW in a different browser, just to make sure I wasn't getting a discount.

CDW was cheaper by a few $ WITHOUT my company's discount.

Is the HL15 and accessories really geared toward homelabbers?

kinda, but also on small businesses. 45d's pricing has always been ridiculous for home lab scenarios alone, even considering the fact that they develop/maintain some software for their products and for general public

To answer the question you asked: No.

The prices are totally logical for what you're getting. But what to buy doesn't make sense for the majority of true "homelabbers". Even the base price of the HL15 at $800 USD doesn't make sense. I got a Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 Full Tower and shoved 16 drives into it, some extra cables, a standard ATX power supply... all brand new and you can get the RAM/CPU and other accessories for significantly under than $800 price tag.

I would argue that the HL15 is a great option...for a small business.

I think they are aiming for “cool stuff, easy mode” for those that want to pay for it.

That’s great and all, but if you’re creative there’s cheaper things you can do. Which to me that’s more fun anyways.

Somehow, I just don’t think the product or the accessories they are selling, are truly aimed at the homelab community. I think they are aimed at the tech bro crowd who want to go and sip overpriced drinks While telling their buddies that they have a new homelab even though they haven’t figured out how to turn it on yet

Is there an easy way to buy the 45 bay chassis bare? i dont want to use the daughter boards, i really just want a case that can hold more than 28 drives. honestly i just want the metal chassis and front/back panels, but im sure they would charge $$$.

Don't worry, they have a lot of shelves too.

Why on earth are sas cables 30$? What's so expensive about sas cable when sata cables are like 2$

sounds like they're probably selling off leftover inventory from customer builds.

these parts wouldn't make great sense for a 15-bay, but for a 45-bay probably right at home.

Seriously, they call it a homelab store and are easily charging 40% more than just going to other resellers. Like $90 for a Supermicro AOC-SLG3-2M2. You can buy them on Amazon for $55 all day long. It's a dumb card, you have to enable bifurcation on the slot you install it in.

I certainly didn't build myself a homelab to pay double for everything.

Sorry Marcus, I don't feel that overburdened by money.

I am not sure some stamped tin and a few circuit boards are worth $1000.

IMHO this is just a $150 Rosewill RSV-R4200U with backplanes, so maybe $300 max.

I would MAYBE think about this if it came fully function certified system for $1000 that I could just drop drives into, but even then that is out of the typical homelab price point and entering the SHO market.

Laughably high price on the chasis and backplane. More expensive than a Norco 24 bay with less features. They didn't seem to have read what people wanted in their thread.

I'm glad it's not just me that thinks their prices are insane (and not in a good way). At first I thought maybe they were showing Canadian prices so I added something to my cart and checked. Nope. USD.

I recently bought a metric crapton of Seagate Exos 20TBs and it looks like they're overpricing that drive by about $130.

After the nightmare of 45 drives in production, no way would I ever wish that on myself at home.

I was mainly interested in the chassis, and put my gear in it. When I seen the price, I was less excited.

I didn’t look as deeply as you have but I got their email today too and thought “who is this for?”