In October 2024 I heard from Szymon who wanted to share his solution to the problem of the small and slow eMMC used by the Wyse 3040. Essentially it was to add a NVMe SSD via the USB3.0 port on the front panel. The thing that caught my attention was the neat way in which he had put it together:
Over to Szymon:
The solution is an Elecgear NV-2242A case and two angled USB3.0-A M-F adapters:
They or their equivalents are easy to find from various suppliers.
There are various points to bear in mind when engineering your solution:
For those that are interested in the technical details of component selection:
The internal Realtek RTL9210 USB bridge supports up to 10GBps transfer speeds with USB 3.1 Gen2. However the Wyse 3040 only has 5Gbps USB3.1 Gen1 port. This actually doesn't matter as the bridge's chipset is throttled for power considerations and the CPU is too slow to make use of full speed anyway.
In summary the USB3/NVMe add-on gives you real 300MB/s transfers, SMART reporting and the ability to easily replace a failed drive. In contrast the on-board eMMC does not offer SMART reporting, and delivers only 35MB/s sustained sequential data writes and pathetic random I/O.
root@3040u1~[]# lsusb -t /: Bus 02.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/6p, 5000M |__ Port 1: Dev 2, If 0, Class=Mass Storage, Driver=uas, 5000M /: Bus 01.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/7p, 5000M root@3040u1~[]# lsusb grep NVM Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0bda:9210 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL9210 M.2 NVME Adapter root@3040u1~[]# smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep "Model Number" Model Number: PC SN530 NVMe WDC 256GB root@3040u1~[]# lsblk NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE COMMENTS sda 8:0 0 238.5G 0 disk ├─sda1 8:1 0 448M 0 part /boot/efi ├─sda2 8:2 0 480M 0 part /boot └─sda3 8:3 0 237.5G 0 part └─sda3_crypt 253:0 0 237.5G 0 crypt / mmcblk0 179:0 0 7.3G 0 disk ├─mmcblk0p1 179:0 0 1023.9M 0 part ├─mmcblk0p2 179:1 0 1G 0 part ├─mmcblk0p3 179:2 0 1G 0 part └─mmcblk0p4 179:3 0 512M 0 part mmcblk0boot0 179:256 0 4M 1 disk mmcblk0boot1 179:512 0 4M 1 disk
He subsequently added:
I'm intending to use front-left USB 2.0 port to add Sonoff CC2652P Zigbee adapter for HA/Z2M IoT connectivity.
...and followed this up with a photo of his 3040 with the wireless module added to the front USB2 port.