I just got off the phone with Josh from 45drives and he pointed me to the “homelab” products because they really meet my needs better. Notice “homelab” in quotes, the HL15 I was looking at is still using a Supermicro X11 main board, which is not really a home type of board. These seem to be just the smaller and maybe a little lower performance end of their product lines, and perfectly fine for smaller use cases like mine.
Just looking for opinions, I have almost a year before I need to make a choice and actually buy something. Going to try and push some new storage through the budget process.
Well, just because they’re using a Xeon platform on a Supermicro server board doesn’t make it any more or less suitable for homelabs, it’s more about the intended use case, which platform to use, and of course budget, which usually leads to certain compromises in home labs compared to an enterprise production environments. And by the way. PC platforms are also used professionally, just usually not in a server role
The main advantages of a server platform/server CPU (Xeon) over a PC platform (Intel Core) that also home users can benefit from are:
More PCI lanes
Support for ECC Ram
IPMI
And these useful features are what 45 Drives has focused on with the HL-15, leaving out other things like redundant and hot-swappable power supplies that enterprise-grade servers have, because high availability is usually not as important in a home lab, and would only add to the cost unnecessarily.
Craft computing had a really nice review on their HL8 machine. I just finished a DIY build using the same motherboard and most of the same components except for the case/backplane. I decided to go with a Fractal node 304 instead. The motherboard is Gigabyte Aorus 550i pro AX mini ITX board with ECC support. They add an ASMedia 1166 based M.2 to six port SATA adapter to achieve a capacity of 10 total drives. So far I am liking the board in my set up. If 8 drive bays is enough for you, you might like the HL8. My set up idles at about 40 watts with 6 SSDs and 2 HDDs installed. I haven’t tried to reduce that yet with powertop, etc.
Supermicro X11 boards aren’t for homelabbers? Man, somebody should have told me before I bought my 36 bay TrueNas 4U box that’s working like a charm w/ a SM X11 mainboard and 2 Intel Xeon Scalable Gold procs.
I also have a Dell R740xd w/ dual similar processors.
Everyone has different means, wishes, and “needs” for their homelab.
Neither are the HP DL360 servers that I have in my lab, but we are kind of an exception. I am looking to scale my lab down to more modest needs. The 10gbe is hard to break though and keeps making me look at more power hungry devices.
Already getting grief about my budget requests, current storage was built in 2016 and 2017. The prices on storage units have gone up by a lot to where shaving things down to $4800.00 each is kind of a feat. We’re talking 4 to 5TB usable storage servers, nothing extravagant here. Even with spinning drives you only save about $200-$300. Thread here AMD Epyc 7313 for Truenas?
A very basic storage server with really no frills except the ability to expand the storage later if needs change.
I priced out a “small” NVME unit to replace a different server, dual Xeon Silver, dual 64GB (4x32) ram, 20+2+2 and possible a +1 m.2 storage server with 1.9TB drives… This was $28,000.00. Would be fast enough for a whole classroom to edit 200mbps video to/from. Current server is bigger but way slower, can safely get about 4 people working with the same files, maybe. That would be 20 storage array, 2 as spare or cache, 2 as OS, and single m.2 as cache. And I’d put in a dual 25gbe card along with the dual 10gbe that comes with the riser. Clients are still gigabit and normally not more than 20 of them at any given time.
