Making my HL15 Homelab more POWERFUL (and Quieter)

After I got my 45Drives HL15 Homelab back in December, I realized how loud it was in my closet: about 67db... My wife wasn't gunna let that fly 😅 SO we're adding some resistors on the fans to reduce the noise, adding a 4214 Xeon Silver Processor, bumping up to 64GB of ram, AND Populating the drives on this puppy to get into it's working form.

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[totallyuneekname]

Thanks for making this video. I think there is a general lack of content out there about making higher-performance homelab equipment run silently. I'd love to see an update video on how this goes in your condo. If I get a server like this in the future I think I'd look at replacing the fans with Noctuas or similar in hopes to bring down the volume.

[Keep_Freedom_Free]

When is the next update on this build? I’m looking to get one but waiting on you 😂

[lechegaray]

looking forward to the TrueNAS video, great work!

[chublez]

Spacing the front fans off the grills should help some also. Should be able to buy some spacers or 3d print some if you have that option.

[jefferyrdavis]

How hard would it be to change the fans? I'm thinking Noctua fans would be quieter and it looks like the motherboard has 4 pin PWM connectors. Also, are these standard 120mm fans?

[HalNordlin]

Just a heads up to those trying this. Apparently the type of Fans they are putting in these units are different now and the Fan Decellerator option will not spin up all of the fans properly. Unfortunately going to need to buy new fans.

[praetorxyn]

I'm not sure why you think the stock CPU isn't powerful enough for what you're doing. Granted, I think for the price they charge you ought to get a better CPU, but I've seen the testing, and with TrueNAS Scale, doing dual 10 Gbps file transfers over SFP+ only pegged the stock CPU at around 40%. I think it would have plenty of headroom for a couple VMs, though I would advise against running any VMs on TrueNAS Scale (Wendell from Level1Techs has a video that can explain why better than I could).

Plus, that CPU can't do hardware transcoding, so I think you'd be much better off running Plex on something else and just having it access your media library via nfs.

Sweet machine though. It's my dream storage server at the moment, but I don't have space for a rack and have no idea when I will.

[bdhaliwal]

It would have been nice if they connected the fans to a pwm controller so at least they don't need to be on all the time.

[ripvanwinkle]

How are the temps after the fan reduction cables