Broken Ipod as Portable Harddrive

[madc0w]

Guys IT IS NOT CF. It is the same connector, but the pins are different. There is a hackaday post on using an IDE>USB converter.

[benol]

One question, I've wondered this a lot with these type of posts, HOW CAN YOU KILL AN IPOD??!! I have a 1st Gen and I treat it like gold.

but gold is unbreakable, iPods are

[blackbox_dev]

The iPod Mini uses the Microdrive. These are pin compatible with CF Type 2 cards.

From Wikipedia:

These drives fit into any CompactFlash II slot; however, they may take more power than flash memory (up to 500 mA) and therefore may not work in some low-power devices (e.g. handheld computers). Nevertheless, they have some benefits over flash memory in terms of the way data is stored and manipulated. Microdrives which can store 4 GB or more must be formatted for a file system which supports this capacity, such as FAT 32 or NTFS, which may not be supported by older CompactFlash hosts, but it is possible to partition a drive so it will contain a partition less than 4GB.

Microdrives are found in the recently discontinued iPod mini and Zen Micro mp3 players, among others. Companies making such players order the Microdrives in large quantities, which can mean that it is cheaper to buy a mp3 player with an integrated Microdrive than a separate Microdrive to add to an expandable mp3 player. An example is the Creative MuVo; many of these were bought up by those interested in purchasing a Microdrive and stripped for their Microdrive which was then replaced by a lower capacity CompactFlash card.

So there you go.