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Open, Repairable Homelab Hardware with 45HomeLab

·4 mins
The IT Guy Show Guest Homelab Open Source
Table of Contents

I have a Dell PowerEdge R720 sitting in a colocation facility a few miles from my apartment, and every time it spins up it sounds like a jet engine for a solid 45 seconds. It is six to eight years old, I pay for the rack space every month, and I flat out refuse to hand Dell a thousand dollars just to unlock the IPMI port. Meanwhile I have 3 gig symmetrical Google Fiber at home and the colo caps me at one gig. So the same question keeps nagging at me: why is my server living somewhere else?

Instead of guessing my way into a replacement, I called someone who builds this hardware for a living. Zack Perry is the face of 45HomeLab, the homelab side of 45Drives, and he walked me through the whole lineup and then actually spec’d a box against my real numbers.

The IT Guy Show · Episode 27 Open the full episode page →

Open and repairable is the actual pitch. 45Drives came up building ultra dense storage, going all the way back to making servers for Backblaze. 45HomeLab takes that same 16 gauge steel, screwed-together, no-lock-in design and points it at people like us. Swap the board, the CPU, the RAM. As Zack put it, as long as it fits, you are not going to break anything. There is even a three tier way to buy: chassis and backplane only if you want to bring your own guts, add the power supply, or a fully built and burned-in machine dropped on your doorstep ready to go.

There is a machine for every rung of the ladder. We climbed from the little Home Client and the Workstation that Zack games on, through the HL4 and HL8 clamshell boxes, up to the HL15, the HL15 Beast with its eight extra SSD bays, and the new X15 that 45HomeLab engineered with the Unraid team, lifetime license included.

He actually spec’d my box. I did my homework before the call: 16 virtual machines, about 124 gigs of RAM in use, most VMs on four cores with Plex and my Forgejo runners on eight, and a real chance all of that doubles in the next year. Zack pointed me straight at an HL15 with an EPYC 7452 (32 cores, 64 threads) on the ASRock ROMED8-2T board, and the direct-wired backplane with a 9400-16i HBA so nothing bottlenecks the drives. He has even run 256 gigs of RAM on it, past the 128 the spec sheet promises.

And it is quiet. My single biggest worry about bringing enterprise gear into a two bedroom apartment is noise. Zack had the numbers ready: 42 to 44 decibels a foot away with the stock Dynatron fans, 33 to 35 at three feet, and quieter still with the Noctua kit. His proof point beats any spec sheet. He has a cat that is scared of every noise, and it sleeps through a reboot a couple feet from the machine.

We also got into the stuff you only get from two people who actually run this gear. My slow crawl toward an infrastructure as code homelab on Fedora bootc and Forgejo, where a change is just a YAML edit and a git push. Whether I finally move off my beloved UniFi and try MikroTik or OPNsense. And the one thing we both absolutely refuse to self-host: email. Zack lost most of a day to it once and never looked back, and honestly that is the correct answer.

If you are weighing colocation against bringing your storage home, or you are just tired of a loud old server, this is the episode I wish I’d had before my last few hardware decisions. While you are at it, go poke around 45HomeLab’s staff picks and their guides at docs.45HomeLab.com, and the full lineup at store.45HomeLab.com.

Watch, listen, and argue with me about it #

New episodes drop every two weeks. If you are into the Fedora side of my life, Noah Chelliah and I host the Fedora Podcast too. And if you are heading to Texas Linux Fest in Austin this November, come find me. I am booked to speak.

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