Ipod Super

I read this: http://www.command-tab.com/index.php/ipod-super

Now I'm tempted to obtain an old Ipod and hook up one of these to it
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822147007

Yep, thats right 500 gigabytes of songs stuffed in my pocket. (I do have a pair of cargo shorts with large pockets that might be able to hold it or it can go in my backpack)

If I do get the time and the resources to build this, I plan to house both in a case with a power supply (SLA, Li-Poly, Mini Fuel Cell, or just a bunch of AA batteries and have myself a extra large Mp3 player.

Anyone know how many songs I might be carrying? I know a 20gb Ipod holds 5000 songs but 125,000 is way more than most carry.

With an estimated size of 5 MB for one MP3-Song, you should be able to store 100000 Songs on a 500 GB harddrive.
I don't think, i know that many songs at all...

Those 3.5" disk drives take a heck of a lot of power. Runtime would be very limited unless you use a LARGE battery pack. Usual mp3's (128 kbit/sec) use about 1 mbyte per minute, so figuring 4 minutes per song, 20gb=5000 songs and 500gb=125000 songs or around 8000 cd's. Do you /have/ that many cd's to rip?

Anyway, there are still some portable audio players that use 2.5" laptop disks that are available up to 120gb these days. You can get older players like that on ebay or elsewhere pretty cheap: I got mine here on B/S/T for $50 with a 10 gig drive. If I were doing it again I'd probably get one with USB 2.0 which supports much faster file transfers, but 1 MB/sec for USB 1.1 isn't completely intolerable.

If you're thinking of something to use at home on AC power, scrounging an old laptop computer makes more sense. You get a big screen and much more flexibility, you can run multiple external hard disks (USB, SATA, or whatever), you can remote control the player through your home wifi or ethernet, there are audiophile grade D/A convertes available, etc. The giant iPod mod is technically cute but doesn't make that much sense for actual use.

I second the idea of a big laptop drive, a hundred gigs or so. A 2.5 inch drive, even a large one would still use less power than a 3.5 inch, and laptop drives are more shock resistant than the desktop ones. You'd still have to add one of those external battery packs for a decent runtime probably.

I dont believe there is any way that you could run a 2.5 or 3.5 inch drive on the iPod's battery, nor upgrade it to the point where it would run it. But you could certainly power the external drive separately, that should be no problem.

For getting ahold of the connector I'd think that it would be better to rework an inexpensive compact flash adaptor PCMCIA card. That already has the connectors for plugging into both sides, so you could have a connector to plug into the iPod and a bit easier soldering hopefully.

I imagine it would br more practical as basically an external drive case with an iPod glued to the front

shame the ipod is broken, but fun none the less What I'd wonder is if you could get the latest greatest and most expensive multi-gigabyte PCMCIA flash card and just plug that directly in. I'll bet you could... but then at this moment a 4 gig CF card costs more than a 4gig iPod nano, so thats not too exciting a project either...

Isn't the drive in an iPod just a 2.5 inch laptop drive to begin with? How else do they get 20, 30, 40, and 60 gigs depending on the version?

It seems to me that the question here is whether you want portable tunes, or lots of storage, or both. One size doesn't always fit all.

It sounds to me as though you are crossing over into the land of so much storage that you have lost portability. Cargo pants or no, dragging around a mini-brick gets old.

You want portable? Get a iPod nano. 4 gigs is more tunes than you can listen to in several battery charge cycles, and it is so small you'll forget it is there.

You want storage? Get an external drive and hook it up to whatever you are using for a computer. And change out your tunes in your portable unit while you are recharging your battery.

But, as always, YMMV.

newo said:

You want portable? Get a iPod nano. 4 gigs is more tunes than you can listen to in several battery charge cycles, and it is so small you'll forget it is there.

Click to expand...

I've seen one of those - about the size of a credit card and less than a 1/4 inch thickness - I'd be afraid to lose it!

Unicorn said:

Isn't the drive in an iPod just a 2.5 inch laptop drive to begin with?

Click to expand...

No, they are the PCMCIA card sized drives from I think, Toshiba. They are MUCH smaller than a regular laptop drive. There are mp3 players that use laptop drives, they tend to be cheaper because the drivers are cheaper, but they are considerably larger and battery life suffers greatly too.

joshooter said:

I'd be afraid to lose it!

Click to expand...

Yes, that is a valid concern... I actually had my shuffle go through the laundry accidently once as I left it in my pocket.... If I had gotten it out before it went into the dryer it would probably have been OK... I really want to know how sturdy the nano is, if I could actually put it in my wallet, that would be fantastic. I'll wait a few more months probably as I just bought a mini not a month before these were announced, and read reviews from other folks trying to do the same thing.

Having carried both the regular sized and the mini and the shuffle now, the big one is too big to get lost in my pocket. I always felt like I was going to squish it. The mini I am aware of in my pocket, but it's not a problem, and the shuffle I can't even find in my pocket I imagine the nano would be similar...

James S said:

No, they are the PCMCIA card sized drives from I think, Toshiba.

Click to expand...

The <10GB are the CF-sized microdrives from Hitachi.
Same drive as the Creative Muvo.
Same drive I stuck in my PPC making the iPod redundant.

I've seen those drives before. The regular Ipod uses the 1.8" Toshiba drives while the Ipod Mini (discontinued in favor of the new nano?) uses those Hitachi microdrive compact flash style drives.

Well, I think it will be impractical to EDC something this big now but it still might work at home or connected to my car radio.

James S said:

No, they are the PCMCIA card sized drives from I think, Toshiba. They are MUCH smaller than a regular laptop drive. There are mp3 players that use laptop drives, they tend to be cheaper because the drivers are cheaper, but they are considerably larger and battery life suffers greatly too.

Click to expand...

I didn't realise that those drives were made to such a large capacity. I have the 30gig Photo, and for some reason was tempted to get the 60gig. Not like don't only have 7 gigs of music, and less than a gig of pics on it. I guess it was the bigger is better, and just in case kind of thing.

I dont think that the original article was suggesting that you'd carry it around after connecting it to a full sized drive Just that you could connect it to a big drive if you for some reason destroyed your original drive. Interesting I'd think of the iPod hardware as taking the place of the firewire or USB bridge board. So you end up with an external drive for storage of backups and things that just also happens to be able to play the music you have stored on it...

I've actually got a "firefly" drive from http://www.smartdisk.com/ this is an older one that is only 5gig with a firewire interface, (it actually came free with one of my previous powerbook purchases from Apple, I think they had bought up a huge number of them just for the drives in case they needed to start cannibalizing other products to feed the iPod which used the same drive for a while) It uses the same PCMCIA sized drive in it, and it's very small. About the same size as an iPod

If you're looking for a really swank home stereo MP3 component, check out http://www.slimdevices.com/

It's really really nice. Granted, it needs your MP3s on a seperate networked box, but that's a given for many folks these days.