In October 2022 I heard from Simon in New Zealand who had two 5060s:
For the first one, I ripped a 128 GB SSD out of its shell and installed it in place of the standard
SATA SSD. Unfortunately the replacement was too wide by about a millimetre or so and thus I had to forgo
the metal shield over the RAM. I also added a second 4GB stick of RAM to bring it up to 8GB -
what a pain that was...
I downloaded and installed Lakka, which is basically RetroArch running
as an OS and I will say that
it is a very competent emulation platform. I've tested emulation for the NES, SNES, Genesis, PS1, PSP and
MS DOS - all work really well. PS2 emulation was not good but that is to be expected, given the hardware
inside. So now it is basically a retro gaming console. Overall I am very happy with the result.
If I were to do this again, I'd probably just leave the original 8GB flash disk in place and have it
read the game ROMs from a NAS or something.
For the second one, not having any spare RAM to hand, I left it at 4GB of RAM. On the software side
I installed LibreELEC/Kodi. It makes for a decent little TV box when all is configured.
Upgrades to the Wyse 5060
In February 2024 I heard from (another) David:
The Target
I wanted to put together a system to act as a backup machine on my LAN. To that end I was looking for
a machine that supported wake-on-lan and could be configured with sufficient storage to hold my backups.
Space not speed was also a priority here.
The 5060 fitted the bill as it supports wake-on-lan (if configured in the BIOS!). I have a backup
script that wakes up the 5060, does the backup, and then turns it off. The 5060 only consumes 1W in its
powered down state so the backup system adds next to nothing to my electricity bill.
Upgrades
Memory: I upgraded my Dell/Wyse 5060 to 16GB of Crucial SODIMM memory.
Search for CRUCIAL DDR3L 8GB 16GB 32GB 1600 MHz
PC3-12800 Laptop Memory RAM SODIMM 204-Pin on ebay.
Flash: I removed the original flash memory from the SATA slot and replaced it with a Crucial
BX500 500GB SATA SSD. In order to do this I shucked open the plastic case of the BX500 and removed the PCB.
The pcb only takes up half the length of the plastic shell and fits nicely into the 5060 although it is
slightly larger than the one it is replacing. As a result you have to remove the metal shield around
the memory and then carefully trim the corner of it where it and the SSD meet before replacing it.
If you pick a different SSD it may well not fit in which case you'll have to come up with another way
of mounting it. My preference was for using an SSD that required the minimum of effort to fit.
You can see the SSD in the photo below and the small overlap between the corner of the SSD and
the corner of the shield that sits over the memory. (The purple pads on the flash memory chips have since
been replaced by stick-on heatsinks)
NVME SSD The 5060 has a M.2 A+E key slot for a wifi card , and in most cases this is empty. It is a little
known fact that with a suitable adapter this slot can also be used for an M.2 NVME SSD. Search for
For Key A-E To NVME Adapter Card NVME Key-M Expansion Support
For M.2 SSD 2230-2280 Wifi Interface To NVME on Amazon or eBay. These cards can be snapped off at various
lengths to suit 2230, 2242, and 2280 SSDs. The 2280 is too long to fit into the 5060 case and 2242 drives aren't
very common. On the other hand 2230 NVME drives are very common and easily accommodated in the 5060 case. Snap the
pcb off at the 2230 mark and fit the supplied retaining bolt for the SSD. Then fit the adaptor card into the
wireless slot in the 5060 and screw it down. There's a hole in the adaptor pcb that corresponds to the 5060
wireless card mounting screw position. I used a
fanxiang M.2 2230 SSD - 1TB NVME SSD PCIe 4.0 from Amazon for my SSD. Simply plug it into the adaptor card,
it's a tight fit, and screw it down. I put a black, finned, self adhesive heatsink on top of my SSD, as you
can see in the photograph below, but this is probably not necessary.
The SSD was recognised by the BIOS and formatted for use with no problems.
As I noted in the 5070 entry there is a speed penalty in using the
standard M.2 A+E WiFi slot in this way as it only has PCIe x1 lane rather than PCIe x4 available on a
NVME interface. Anyway in this instance David was after capacity, not out-and-out speed.
