Thread: question about using ipod as primary media storage

I use my ipod like this daily for my camera. I have the ipod adapter, I am constantly using it for space transftering 2gb of files at a time. I have never had any issues.

Originally Posted by tominated

never us an ipod as a main storage device!!!!!
it's hard drive is designed to just spin at the start of a song and then stop. it doesn't have the room for air to cool it down, so the drive will die quickly!

This is a bit harsh, but I don't disagree with the basic premise (iPods don't make good external drives).

After recently losing my 4th gen that I had been using to back up one of my Macs for the last 6 months (rsync against ~30GB of data (half changed frequently) every 15 minutes 8-10 hours a day for 5 days a week) i've come the following conclusions:

1) It's spinup/spindown feature which is nice for saving battery power is a PITA when it is in disk mode. It's a slow drive to begin with, and this makes it even worse if the drive isn't kept spinning.

2) It wasn't designed for continuous usage. It was designed to spin up, load the next group of songs, then spin down again. It is also more than capable of infrequent "constant" (e.g. loading music, etc..) use where that represent a burst while loading/unloading it.

So I bought real portable drive to be my backup disk and my wife just got me a new Nano for x-mas

As far as iPod usage in a car, I don't think there would be any noticeable difference to it's life span in a car environment (regardless of how much it is used) outside of leaving it in the car during extreme temps.

-dave

i can say that it is slow, but like i said before i have never had any real problems with it.

I thought the newer generation of Ipods don't support firewire anymore? USB2.0 is way slower of a transfer rate then firewire 400 and definitely slower then firewire 800.

And as I learned in my Apple desktop certification, iPods can be used as a backup device, you can boot from them as a recovery harddrive OS if they support firewire, but not recommended for daily direct access as a portable harddrive due to battery and spin issues.

i have a photo. so its the 800.

Originally Posted by pepsibobby

i have a photo. so its the 800.

Uhh, the photo is usb2, not firewire 800. As far as I know, there are no firewire 800 iPods.

well i use a firewire cable and use as an external. so maybe its 400, its the older one. i dont even own a iPod usb cable.

Yea, that would be 400.

thanks guys for all of the comments and information. i think that for now i will it out on my older 20gig ipod to sort of get an idea of how it will work. i'm using itunes primarily right now as the way AMP works is not how i would go about playing music (which is my primary use for the carpc right now, until i get GPS working well in osx.