I have some updates regarding the M.2 - SDIO adapter for the DELL Wyse 3040. I asked an
acquaintance of mine to improve a bit on the PCB design originally shared by April on your site.
The improved designs are available here:
https://github.com/martonmiklos/m.2_microsd. We had a handful of boards manufactured and I
recently got to test them.
The following tests were with my 3040 using Windows 10 and with Linux. Windows 10
was a generic install to the onboard 16GB eMMC by the previous owner. The Linux distribution
was V11 of SystemRescue run from a USB drive.
My experiences so far have been as follows:
I had a total of thirteen micro-SD cards to try, and out of those I found two that seemed to
work with this adapter and the thin client.
The two that apparently worked were older SanDisk branded cards, one a 16GB (plain black colour scheme)
card and one a 32GB (red/grey SanDisk Ultra). Whilst my pool of cards included a number of red/grey
SanDisk Ultra only one of them worked in the adapter.
None of my recent SanDisk Extreme/Extreme Pro cards worked. They ranged in size from 32GB
to 256GB in size.
None of my Kingston branded cards worked.
It seems that the cards that worked were SDHC ones, and supported at most UHS-I speeds,
and were using SDR104 data rate in the thin-client
Turning to the two cards that actually did something:
With Windows 10 I could see the cards okay, and even write to them, but re-reading
the written data, after a reboot did not work.
With Linux they worked out of the box and did not require any additional boot/kernel parameters
or seperate driver. (The related kernel messages can be seen in the listing below.)
With Linux the write speed is pretty moderate at around 11.2MB/s for the 16GB card and
15.5MB/s for the 32GB one, and, unlike with Windows, the written data can be read back successfully
after an unmount.
So all in all, there should be a big fat warning next to this adapter design, as it seems to be
only by chance that you can come by an older card that the thin client will work with (or you
have to be pretty thorough in your search). But at least I was able to verify that the adapter
design itself is correct, and functional, in that there were at least two cards that worked in it.
I have the following update for the Dell 3040 SDcard topic:
I recently managed to get my hands on three more 3040 thin-clients. My original 3040 was manufactured
in 2018 and used a 5V/3A PSU. The latest ones were manufactured in 2020 and had 12V/2A PSUs.
I took the SD cards that hadn't worked with the 2018 version and retested them with my latest 2020 examples
- and got much better results.
I tested them with a total of 9 micro-SD cards. The "best" 3040 worked with 5 of them,
whilst the "worst" only worked with 3.
The great news is that all of these newer models worked with my two SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC cards
one of which was a 256GB one. One thing that I noticed was that the SanDisk Ultra cards that worked
had a better read speed - around 80 MB/s - whilst the Extreme Pros maxed out around 30-35 MB/s.
Unfortunately I can't give you a rule of thumb telling you which type of card would work or not.
The good news though is that newer models of the 3040 seem to be more compatible with a wider range
of memory cards including SDXC cards.
