Sadly, not enough space to add a 2.5" drive, but there is an M.2 slot for the wifi, though I don’t know if it’ll accept it, I might replace that with a cheapo M.2 SSD and go with a USB wifi adapter, but that would be down the line and likely only if the EMMC is toast (aka have no other option). I was hoping to replace that wifi module with one that has GPS, since the point of this thing is its portability (while running full linux/gnu).
It has almost nothing for available ports, but I was considering taking one and hard wiring in an internal USB hub for adding these things (GPS, storage, etc) and breaking out one of the ports somewhere else in the case (possibly a second one as USB3 over a type-c connector), but thats a long-shot, because it being a portable device for the purpose of being super portable and being a 2-in-1 means it can be held in any way like a tablet, or stood on its side, etc, I can’t have USB devices sticking out the side of it all of the time, and wiring in to the board is tricky, and a bit of a pain for the USB3 port too (more wires, pain of a location, etc). I’d only do that if I can find a cheap spare board. If it were a normal laptop, I’d just use some double-sided tape or industrial velcro and stick really thin devices to the lid, but with this it folds back on itself so that won’t work.
I may wind up finding myself a TINY USB3.0 flash drive that sits close enough to flush, but I don’t have high hopes for random IO speeds on regular flash (which is as I understand it very different from EMMC in its performance). That might be a good hope for caching and the /tmp folder though I suppose. I am sure I could live with giving up a 2.0 port even for that, but I’d like to keep the 3.0 port available for making backups and plugging in a hub with other extra junk I might want to use once in a while.
Yeah my goal is to be able to do really low power tasks, read docs and manuals, hopefully do some SDR (software defined radio) stuff just for fun, hoepfully toy with somme mapping software, etc. I also have wanted to toy with making a tablet with full linux+GNU work really well for a decade, and this seems a good chance.
For backups, I am thinking of automating a popup to yell at me to run a backup script over wifi to a local media server every once in a while or something. Never done that before so I don’t know how that’d work. Maybe make a system tray icon for that (never done that before).
This seems to have strayed. So far, we have talked about F2FS and moving .cache and /tmp, and I think concluded they maybe should wind up on a thumb drive. I just realized like a dummy, there is a uSD card slot, which I will be filling with a quality uSD card. They can beat up the uSD if need be. That is an expensive bit of storage to beat up, but what else am I going to do? It is also slow as a dog (even a really nice SD card), but it should do fine I’d think. Maybe I’ll even throw some swap space on there too, just in case, and make sure swappiness is set to the “if death is the only other option” setting. I havn’t had swap on a disk in at least 5 years (have not needed it no matter what I was doing). Should be interesting to see if I could find a sweet spot for it.
Does that sound like I am getting somewhere? F2FS on the EMMC, moving .cache and /tmp (and giving it a bit of swap? maybe a gig, or two for the heck of it? or is that just a waste?) to a uSD card.
