Recently I bought a Dell Wyse 5070 thin client on ebay to replace a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ that I was using as a qdevice for my proxmox 2 node cluster. While waiting for the m.2 sata drive I decided to mess around with the emmc module.
My plan for the thin client in the long run is to use as a third proxmox node instead of a qdevice. However I also have 2 more plans for it:
- Proxmox backup to USB 3.0 external HDD
- UPS NUT server.
Operating System
I run DietPi on the RPI 3 and figure it would work great on the thin client’s emmc since it doesn’t write logs to disk and instead keeps it in memory. I was able to download and install DietPi fine, but then I tried to install proxmox virtual environment on top using [this](https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_12_Bookworm] guide. Everything works, just very, very slowly. Just installing small packages from apt takes a long time.
Benchmarking / Data
I’ve heard people say emmc is similar to Micro Sd cards, but in this situation the emmc seemed much, much slower than the RPI3’s micro sd card. In order to get some actual data, I used the benchmarking tools that Jeff Geerling used on his pidramble.
hdparm
Here is the results of the hdparm, starting with the Dell Wyse emmc:
$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/mmcblk0
/dev/mmcblk0:
Timing buffered disk reads: 484 MB in 3.01 seconds = 160.94 MB/sec
And here is the RPI 3:
$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/mmcblk0
/dev/mmcblk0:
Timing buffered disk reads: 68 MB in 3.01 seconds = 22.57 MB/sec
Interesting to see that it’s faster on the thin client, perhaps due to the cpu/mem being much more?
dd
Here are the results of the dd test, starting with the Dell Wyse emmc:
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=8k count=50k conv=fsync ; rm -f test
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
419430400 bytes (419 MB, 400 MiB) copied, 239.532 s, 1.8 MB/s
And here is the RPI 3:
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=8k count=50k conv=fsync
51200+0 records in
51200+0 records out
419430400 bytes (419 MB, 400 MiB) copied, 35.2489 s, 11.9 MB/s
Ouch, emmc is about 10x slower in this test.
iozone
Here are the results of the iozone test, starting with the Dell Wyse emmc:
4k rand read 4k rand write
10338 8122
And here is the RPI 3:
4k rand read 4k rand write
4842 1826
Conclusion
Very interesting that the dd test did so poorly but the other 2 did much better. The emmc seems much slower to me in day to day operation, but it’s good to know you can at least install Debian, and even PVE on the emmc drive.
Now to install a sata m.2 and get some good io.