Hello, so we all know that 32 GB of firmware storage is not allot to work with if you have a lot of packages etc . I confess I use my librem 5 like a desktop since I work in an environment where personal laptops are not allowed for security , but cell phones are not prohibited. With all that said, after upgrading the phone to wifi-6 and better bluetooth via the available pci-card I began to wonder if the onboard flash storage might be possible to upgrade in the further it is honestly the biggest hardware limitation from being able to depend on the device as a actually phone. I have seen other posts talk about updating firmware, but I am specifically talking in storage capacity as I have been working around alot with the SDcard but performance is a bit better when things are able to be stored on the local firmware instead of the SDCARD.
I was throwing around money like a madman and bought multiple liberty phones so that I can part swap stuff when I inevitably drop and break one, so that I can keep it running. I’ve already done the thing where I dd the image from eMMC onto SD card while dual booted from SD, then boot the SD in another physical liberty phone, and dd the prior phone eMMC contents onto that one, to move forward a device with a perfect transfer that retains all files.
So, maybe I have artificially extended the lifetime of my liberty phone experience by injecting in money, but for what it’s worth:
My hard drive on my phone is showing:
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/dm-0 119655720 46347012 68389112 41% /
… thus implying that after almost a year and without any specific cleaning, my usage has reached 46GB.
That’s extremely anecdotal but I’m daily driving L5 as my only phone, using it every day.
So my thoughts are that you are entirely correct and I would want that upgrade, because I am in fact already using it, although at the exorbitant cost of buying liberty phones after a non USA L5 led me to the conclusion that I want all possible upgrades for this experience, and I want them ASAP.
Depends what you mean by “upgrade” and what your budget is?
If budget is not an issue, you can buy a Purism phone with 128 GB of onboard disk storage. Problem solved. But let’s suppose that the budget doesn’t quite stretch that far …
Upgrade existing eMMC disk in place? Unlikely ever to be an option. It’s soldered on.
Upgrade by replacing main board? Maybe.
That’s what I would really like to see addressed - the leisurely speed of the µSD card interface.