M.2 SSD Upgrade

[barray]

Has anybody thrown an M.2 SSD in yet? I've just purchased one to try out, hoping it works out of the box. I intend to flash it by just dd'ing a downloaded image to it whilst boot from the SD card.

Also I saw some people were having trouble getting the back off and one person broke the digitizer, any instructions on how to do this safely?

[quipacorn]

Has anybody thrown an M.2 SSD in yet? I've just purchased one to try out, hoping it works out of the box. I intend to flash it by just dd'ing a downloaded image to it whilst boot from the SD card.

Also I saw some people were having trouble getting the back off and one person broke the digitizer, any instructions on how to do this safely?

As far as I can tell they still haven't released the adapter/expansion board so it's not possible to install an m.2. drive currently

[barray]

@quipacorn Are you sure? Looking at a picture of the board, there seems to be an M.2 slot at the bottom [1].

Definitely would be interested to hear if anybody else has taken the dive to give it a test though... It's entirely possible there's not even kernel support yet...

[1] https://tuxphones.com/content/images/201...odem-1.jpg

[quipacorn]

@quipacorn Are you sure? Looking at a picture of the board, there seems to be an M.2 slot at the bottom [1].

Definitely would be interested to hear if anybody else has taken the dive to give it a test though... It's entirely possible there's not even kernel support yet...

[1] https://tuxphones.com/content/images/201...odem-1.jpg

That's the adapter board which has not yet been released. 

Please see this thread: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=10245

Specifically this response from TL: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...0#pid69410

As far as I know the base LTE expansion board is the SSD board as well since both LTE and SSD cards themselves use the M.2. socket. This was mentioned in that thread but not confirmed. 

I've also opened up two early adopter PineTabs and found no expansion cards. If you find one in yours you'd be extremely lucky. 

That said, the expansion boards should hopefully be released soon. Fingers crossed!

[barray]

Dammit! Thanks for letting me know @quipacorn ! I guess this is why nobody has done anything with an SSD yet that I could read...

I _really_ want to throw an SSD in there, I really hate the unreliability of SD cards. I could flash the emmc memory, but I haven't had a great experience with it either. I've exceeded write limits very easily on many devices.

Still, i will open it up when it arrives and take a look, I at least want to know what is in there. Hopefully I don't break it in the process!

[quipacorn]

Dammit! Thanks for letting me know @quipacorn ! I guess this is why nobody has done anything with an SSD yet that I could read...

I _really_ want to throw an SSD in there, I really hate the unreliability of SD cards. I could flash the emmc memory, but I haven't had a great experience with it either. I've exceeded write limits very easily on many devices.

Still, i will open it up when it arrives and take a look, I at least want to know what is in there. Hopefully I don't break it in the process!

No problem. I'm in the same boat, with Arch at least you can't boot to the eMMC with any microSD in the slot even if it's just a "data" disk which is what I'm going with for now. An SSD will solve that problem at least.

Best of luck! Thanks for reminding me I want to post a poll about opening the back and screen cracks. If you have a screen protector be extra wary, with my first unit I opened it a few times with no problems (testing cables and such since the touchscreen didn't work) with the second when I swapped in a higher capacity eMMC the corner of the screen cracked. I'm thinking it's from having a tempered glass protector not letting the screen flex with the frame but it's hard to say.

[barray]

@quipacorn Opened it successfully and put it back together without breaking anything. Seems like there's a bit of a trick to it: http://coffeespace.org.uk/projects/openi...ck-off.jpg

[quipacorn]

@quipacorn Opened it successfully and put it back together without breaking anything. Seems like there's a bit of a trick to it: http://coffeespace.org.uk/projects/openi...ck-off.jpg

Nice!

And there definitely is. Best I figured out was to start with the bottom pogo pins when reassembling. Other than that I'm not sure of anything my track record is like 4/5 with no problems.

[barray]

@quipacorn Yeah, my method taking it off was to start with the "plain side" (opposite the USB ports) and to work around taking it off from there, leaving the pogo pins till last. Then putting it back on it was pogo pins first, working my way towards the opposite side.

In general I think it's a good idea to avoid flexing the display at all costs. I think somebody should really do a "help video", especially when it comes to offering expansion boards.

In all honesty they should really just put in some M2 (or even M1s) to hold the back on that way it's pretty idiot proof. The whole "peeling" process seems like it will bite them later when people go to mod their devices.

[guenther]

I'm in the same boat, with Arch at least you can't boot to the eMMC with any microSD in the slot even if it's just a "data" disk which is what I'm going with for now.

Sure? I had that issue after using the SD as booting device. Creating a new partition table with gparted solved it. After that no issue under Mobian to boot from eMMC with SD inserted.