60GB iPod Mod?

[dangelovich]

Anyone heard of iPod mods whereby the hard drive is replaced?
i.e. replacing a the hard drive for a bigger one

Anything in there that would stop such a thing from working?

[Robo]

I don't know what would keep it from working. I'm pretty sure Apple will bring out a 60 GB model soon, so it should work fine. Of course, there could be something that limits the size of the hard drives in the iPod's OS. But then again, I'm sure they would have gotten rid of that in the recent iPod revision. So idunno - it should work, unless each iPod has some weird lock type of thing that required the HD to be "blessed" - I've heard that iPods need special stuff on their HDs, because that's one reason why nobody took apart iPod minis and sold their HDs on eBay, like they did to the Nomad. So it may work, it may not. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful, but Google it - I'm sure you're not the first person to think of this.

Seriously, though, would you really want to? For the price of the 60 GB HD, you could just buy a 20 GB iPod - it'd probably be cheaper. Oh, and after the iPod surgery, what would you do with the 40GB HD? Unless, of course, you're talking about taking like a 10 GB iPod and modding it up to 60 gigs - in which case, you might run into all sorts of problems, who knows. But seriously, man - the player manufacturers get all those drives for way cheaper then we do, so you'd be better off just buying a new iPod. It would be interesting, however, to see if you could buy another MP3 player, and stuff that drive into the iPod...

Sorry for the rant...I know I'm not much help, but I did give you the best advice possible: Google it! Oh, and is this really hardware speculation?

[dangelovich]

It's hardware based speculation as to whether or not it can be done...

[Robo]

I get what you're saying, it's just that this is more of a "Talk about the iMac G5 and occaisionally complain about what's taking the Powerbook G5s so long" forum. ;) I'm not griping that this post is out of place or whatever, don't get me wrong, you'd probably just have better luck at the Genius Bar or whatever...because I can tell you, few people here are geniuses :D

[Luca]

Moved to Genius Bar.

[Escher]

I've been curious about the opposite. Could you replace the HDD in the iPod mini with a flash-based memory card? The IBM/Hitachi microdrive in the iPod mini is exactly the same size and pinout as a Compact Flash memory card. Would an iPod mini with say a 1GB CF Card instead of the mini-HDD have better battery life? Or would the introduction of solid-state memory screw up the mechanism that spins up and idles the mini-HDD?

Escher