Several months after the first ipod was released on the world by an unsuspecting Apple, whose stock price was at the time teasing the lower teens and sparking talks of a buy-out by various parties, I bought one brand-new on ebay. It’s been a great device until recently! Now, whenever the hard drive spins up, it wheezes the loud hum of an unhappy, dying drive. I don’t suppose I can blaim it; it’s got tough duty in there, crammed in a small case with no room to breath for four years, rattling around in my carry-on luggage through airport after plane flight after airport, enticing Elizabeth with its cute small screen and little buttons and clicky wheel to the point she’s pulled it off the stereo cabinet and on to the hardwood floor at least once.
Yes, letting the music play on the home stereo may require an ipod hack job. Replacing the hard drive sounds easy, in fact the hardest part may be finding a drive that fits. We’ll see. I could always, as Scott suggested, mount the whole thing in an old, unused CD-ROM enclosure and turn it in to a non-portable with a 3.5 inch desktop drive. I wonder what size drive the IDE interface is capable of handling? I bet it would handle a 120, but no bigger than that. After all, Macs of that era didn’t handle drivers larger than 120 on their IDE busses.