A few months ago, I wrote about replacing the battery in my old iPod with a brand spankin' new one, and concluded that post with my intention to eventually upgrade the HDD (for both more storage capacity, and because the drive wasn't being detected on any computer).
Well, that time has come, and as of a few days ago, I now have a fully working* iPod again, complete with 128GB of fancy solid-state storage!
I'd like to say that it was a lot of hard work to remove the original hard drive and replace it with one of these guys, but that would be a lie. To be honest, the iPod Video is a surprisingly repairable piece of technology. Swapping out the hard drive was as simple as (carefully) disconnecting one ribbon cable, and (carefully) reconnecting a new one.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
* In the world of classic iPods, fully working is relative. iTunes can still be used to manage these things, but only on Windows, and it's become so bloated that I often have to reboot my computer in order for iTunes to pick up the device (even though Windows itself seems to see it just fine). I'm exploring other alternatives, like Rockbox, or even just using my old college laptop with an older version of iTunes, but I'm not quite ready for either of those solutions yet.
As of right now, it works just fine as an iPod (although the iPod connector on my old-and-busted Audi doesn't seem to like the new drive size, since the startup time is pretty severe and switching artists and albums takes many more minutes than it should.
For my next trick, I am considering replacing the shell with one of these transparent ones from AliExpress, but that's an adventure for another time.
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This is post 056 of #100DaysToOffload