The Dell Wyse 3040 Thin Client is a nifty computer that can effectively serve the File-Server requirements of a very small organisation – for example, an organisation that has about 10 people using computers for Document & Spreadsheets, Tally Accounting, Emails etc. It certainly has a number of drawbacks, mostly software related but for a computer that costs less than a “Raspberry Pi Zero Wi-Fi” and performs better than a “Raspberry Pi 3”, it’s hard to deny it’s usefulness.
The screenshot above illustrates an instance where the device has been configured as a Samba server that is compatible with Windows, Mac OS, Android devices.
The device is running Diet-Pi (x64). It boots to ‘bash’ shell – root login. As you can see from the screenshot, of the 1.84 GB usable physical RAM on the computer, about 249 MB is in use. The RAM usage includes disk-cache.
The Dell Wyse 3040 has 4 USB ports of which one is a USB 3.0 port (5 Gbps) and the balance are USB 2.0 ports (400 Mbps). To the USB 3.0 port, I have a “Western Digital 1 TB Portable External SATA HDD” connected as the main data drive. To the other USB 2.0 drives, I have 2 nos. “Orico 512GB SATA SSD” drives connected using Portable External HDD Case (USB 3.0 interface, Brand: Sounce, OEM: JMicron).
In the screenshot above, I am running 2 ‘cp’ (copy) operations in-parallel, that are making a backup of specific folders recursively from the HDD to the SSD. The CPU usage hovered around 50% (all cores) and CPU temperatures hovered around 60 C (all cores). After the copy process completed, the CPU usage fell back to about 8% and CPU temperature to about 35 C.
The computer is also running ‘dropbear’ to provide Terminal access over SSH, a Python script to provide ‘http’ access to the files using a file-browser interface, and ‘htop’ to monitor usage.
The Good
- The entire setup is near silent with the only soft noise being the mechanical WD 1TB HDD
- The power consumption of the unit is a measly 15W (5V 3A)
- The heat generation is negligible.
- Performance is reliable – I have kept the device switched On for days altogether and it simply keeps working. There are no memory leaks, hardware failures etc. The only time the machine is restarted is when a software update recommends a reboot or due to unexpected power cut.
The Bad
- The USB interface of the device can stop responding upon repeated connection / disconnection of the USB disks. Upon error, you will not be able to mount the drive or safely eject them (udisksctl). This ends up requiring a computer restart.
- Since the power-supply to the overall device is limited to 15W, HDDs which take up-to 5W can have performance or disconnection issues. Fortunately, most modern Portable HDDs take up-to 3W and work trouble free. SSDs take less than 1W and work flawlessly.
The Ugly
- For some reason, possibly Linux kernel related, USB Read-Write performance in Storage Devices is very slow when compared to Windows. For example, the Orico SSD when connected to a USB 3.0 port on a ‘Dell i3-4th Gen Mini PC’ showed Disk-write upwards of 350 MB/s but when connected to the ‘Dell Wyse 3040’ showed only about 30 – 40 MB/s when connected to the USB 3.0 port. Running ‘dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1M count=10 oflags=sync of=/mnt/extdisk2/test.txt’ (essentially disabling write-cache) results in performance of around 200 Kbps on a USB 3.0 SATA SSD
- Configuring the 2 SSDs as a software RAID-0 array using ‘mdadm’ shot up the read/write performance to about 70 MB/s, which is still quite poor because each of these SSDs is capable of over 450 MB/s when connected to USB 3.0 ports on computers running Windows 10. Ironically, this is not due to any CPU limitation – the ‘Intel Atom X5-8350 CPU’ is very capable as a Desktop Computer and the CPU usage during these tests hovered around 30 – 40%.
I have used ‘Asus eeePC Netbook’ computers featuring ‘Intel Atom N270 CPU’ running ‘Windows XP’ from a ‘160GB SATA HDD’ and used to be productive on it. The ‘Intel Atom X5-Z8350 CPU’ in these devices is nearly 4x faster. - The onboard 2GB soldered RAM and 8GB soldered eMMC make it impossible to run a modern Windows OS installation. I will attempt to configure another of these devices to run Windows XP or Windows 7 since these retired Operating Systems are actually still good-enough to create a mini file-server for a small company. With the right configuration, hypothetical security threats from viruses inside the network can be minimized and the firewall in the ISP provided Internet Router completely stops inbound access to the device. The challenge will be to minimize ‘writes’ to the eMMC because these fail quickly. ‘Diet-Pi’ Linux is specifically configured to minimize disk-writes and uses ‘ramlog’.
Conclusion
Overall, no one in the organisation even once commented about any performance issues from the file-server and leads me to believe that with more tweaking, the device will probably be sufficient for a team of up-to 25 people. A caveat is that the files being created on the file-server are common office document formats such as DOCX, XLSX, PDF etc.
We are not trying to power a Photo/Audio/Video production company using cheap alternative to a Raspberry Pi.