I’d heard there were several other systems in the works, with one to come by Christmas, and understanding of course that timelines can slip, just wanted to check on the status of these, assuming there’s any information able to be shared as of yet?
Thanks!
Yeah I’d love more info about this too. I want to buy a little thin client that looks good in the rack to replace my raspberry pi 4
Can’t say that I’m as thrilled about a 45drives thin client as I was about the HL15, or would have been about the release of the HL4/HL8. But curious nonetheless. There are already plenty of powerful yet low power mini pcs out on the market that offer an excellent value proposition, so it will be interesting to see what will set this thin client apart from the rest of them.
Hi, We do plan on making a smaller HL8/4 in the future but right now we have not done any work to it and have not even started to think about it.
Currently, the RnD team is concentrating on getting a thin client created to allow you to stream your photos and data from your HL15 without needing it in your living room. As far as I know, there is no release date for the thin client yet
Thanks for the response - much appreciated!
I’d heard the ‘released by Christmas’ on the 45 drives podcast, though that was a few episodes back, so I understand things have likely just changed a bit since then. I’ll continue to keep an eye out!
Gotta be honest, I have Apple TVs for this, I like them, they cost $129, I’m already heavily in the Apple ecosystem and they really do Just Work ™ insanely well with iPhones, iPads, HomePod Minis, etc.
Wish you the best of luck with the thin client, I went HL15 (vs. piecing it together with Rosewill or whomever else) largely to support 45Drives and the endeavor. If nobody supported smaller businesses there’d be no innovation and less choice. However, unlike the HL15 where I bought three and probably want another another two shortly, I just can’t see myself buying a thin client.
If you do ship a HL8 or a HL4, that’d be very interesting too (and I’m a bit sad it was prioritized behind the thin client), I’m looking for something smaller to hide away in my fire safe for backups. 
Necro-ing this post a bit, but it popped into my head today. (Maybe I just like bugging SpringerSpaniel… hahah).
While I too am vested in the Apple ecosystem, and like my Mac, iPhone, and iPad, the list stops about there. My AppleID is used nowhere outside of those devices, as well as any of my media as I’m not too fond of recent stories regarding false flagging media and terminating accounts. The thin client would be a welcome addition to the TV as I’m looking to kill off all the “Smart TV” capabilities and disconnecting the panel itself from the internet, due to recent news about TV’s capturing screenshots of ALL content even an HDMI input and collecting the data to sell to ad agencies. No thanks!
But, privacy concerns aside and tinfoil hat removed, I still like the idea of a thin client. It could be an excellent opportunity for someone to create a compute only container cluster. A la Docker Swarm or Kubernetes.
Any updates on the HL4/HL8? And what about the thin client or has it been shelved?
We are still actively working on the thin client, it is taking a bit more time to decide on the route we want to take (form factor and motherboard format). We are also looking at recreating our enterprise MI4 and C8 chassis and when we do that we will also be making a HL4 and HL8 chassis based on those new designs.
In short yes we are still working on it but I wouldn’t hold your breath as it may be some time before we get it.
Thanks for the feedback! I’m hoping for something like the MI4 that’s rack mountable so I can pick up a few of the chassis and make a small ceph cluster that I can use for testing in my homelab in order to trial different things work is wanting to use (as you can’t exactly test in your employer’s prod instance lolol).
It would be awesome if one of these smaller units could intergrate 45drives’ new UBM that support hotswappable SAS, SATA and NVMe drives!
I left a post on the store feedback/suggestions board regarding use of a modified Mi4 as an application server for ML (ref learning) model development. I indicated a swag of what my specific needs were, so wont repeat here. Certainly look forward to updates in this regard.