Replace the iPod Harddrive? possible?

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WillowHawk

Gawd
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Jul 7, 2004
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my brother came up with a wonderful idea...what about buying the cheapest regular ipod, and buying a laptop HD of a much larger capacity, and droppign that in there..

is it possible? are the power requirements the same? what about shape?....most importantly what about the file formatting? i'm a PC guy, so i dont know anything about apple file formatting...and i'm not sure if its NTFS or FAT32 or something else...

think its possible?
 
There is a size difference between the two regular ipods because the hard drive is bigger. You wouldn't be able to put in a new one because there would not be room for anything bigger than the original (I think the 20gb one is a single platter drive and the 40gb a double one). The ipod photo is larger than the regular ipod because it also has a bigger hard drive than the two...I don't think it will work.
 
you can, if you get a drive that will fit. there are web sites that sale the drives that do fit...
 
the ipods use micro drives on the ipod mini's and something similar in the regular ipods...they are not the standard 2.5" laptop drives and are much smaller....is it possible...don't see why not but finding a drive that will fit and keep it less than what you would pay for just by upgrading will be the tough part
 
I'm pretty sure you can't. I believe the Ipod uses 1.8in drives while regular laptop drives are 2.5in. 60gb is the max (which is the size the Ipod Photo has). If apple had the capability of producing higher capacity Ipods, I'm sure they would.
 
do they have a 30gb single platter yet? that might be kinda cool. especially to drop in a 10/15/20 3g. i really like those ones. so sleek.
 
I'm not sure, but I believe IPODs use PCMCIA type 2 and type 3 drives, for the form factor.
 
One guy bought an iPod Mini (which costs less than than the hard drive inside it would alone), and then took out the 4gb HD, which he proceeded to throw in his camera. He then put a 512MB CF card in the iPod, so it still worked and he eliminated all moving parts.

Cool stuff.
 
miazmaticdotcom said:
One guy bought an iPod Mini (which costs less than than the hard drive inside it would alone), and then took out the 4gb HD, which he proceeded to throw in his camera. He then put a 512MB CF card in the iPod, so it still worked and he eliminated all moving parts.

Cool stuff.
Click to expand...

Wasn't that with the Creative Nomad? :rolleyes:
And who would want to break open an iPod :eek: for a HD? :)
 
just checked and the drives being used are as following

iPod Click Wheel - 1.8" ATA/66 PC Card HD 4200RPM
iPod Mini - 1" Hitachi Microdrive 3600RPM
 
It is possible, did it to my 3Gen, and someone else has done it, ive got an 80 gig drive running in my old 3g 40 giger
 
well, now that i think about it..my question was not exactly is i could find a harddrive to fit in there, but rather if the IPOD had some sort of special file formatting...i'm assuming that its operation system is stored on some ROM somewhere in the device, but now i want to know if it can work with any hard drive...heck, if i can fit the stuff on a 160 gig HD..even if its outside of its nifty little plastic white case...that would be pretty cool as a portable Harddrive/mp3 player.
 
As for the filesystem, you're fine. A HD's a HD, as far as the iPod cares, and all you'll have to do is use the iPod Updater and reformat your iPod once you have the new drive installed. The filesystem format will vary depending on if you format it on a Mac or a Win machine: Mac formatting yeilds HFS Extended Journaled, i believe, and a Windows format probably yeilds a FAT32 or NTFS filesystem. Would there be any problem with the BIOS in the iPod as far utilizing all of the space in the HDD?



On a second note, i came across a dead iPod, and i'm trying to use its HDD as just a plain PCMCIA card HDD... (3G). Does anyone know if this will work? It still works as a FireWire drive, but i own a PB and just want to streamline a little.
 
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