As a home lab YouTuber, it was only a matter of time before I ended up with a 45Drives HL15… but not for my own rack. In this video I walk through a real-world build I did for my previous employer (my church): two HL15-based TrueNAS Scale storage servers—one primary and one local backup. The big constraints were budget and space (their AV racks are only about 21" deep), and the HL15 ended up being a really solid fit: compact for a 15-bay chassis, but still enough density to do the job. For the primary system, we bought a preconfigured HL15 with a base CPU and 256GB of RAM (plus a nice upgrade path with onboard 10Gb, even if they’re stuck on gigabit for now). For the backup server, I saved money by building it with used eBay parts: a Supermicro LGA2011-3 board, an E5-2620 v4, 64GB ECC, and an LSI HBA flashed to IT mode. Storage-wise, we went with 10x 24TB drives split into two 5-drive RAIDZ1 vdevs—because this is a local backup in a broader 3-2-1 plan, not the primary production box. I also show the HL15 assembly quirks (tight but straightforward thanks to the backplane), my slightly janky PCIe fan bracket solution for HBA cooling, and how I set up snapshots + replication tasks in TrueNAS (with a shout-out to Tom Lawrence’s guide). In the end, it’s a practical, “what actually worked” setup that balances reliability, cost, and real constraints.