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I currently have a 160GB iPod Classic purchased in October 2011. I was thinking about replacing the hard drive with an SSD (say, a 240-256GB model). A few questions: will an SSD work in an iPod Classic as it is supposed to? Is it worth upgrading the Classic or should I seek an alternative (iPod Touches are too expensive in price per GB!)? Has anyone done it and can it be done safely?

Coming from a Zune hard-drive base here, but what I've Googled on iPod Classic disassembly seems to be congruent. All hard-drive based MP3 players are IDE-based with special connectors. You simply won't find a way to bodge a SATA SSD into a device expecting IDE over a proprietary non-standard connector.

I tried to find a way to upgrade my 120GB Zune with the 160GB iPod drive and could never find a way to make it work, mainly because the two camps had different proprietary connectors.

Based on this Macrumors forum thread, the classic uses the same connector as the original Macbook Air's SSD. So not just any SSD, but a proprietary one with proprietary connections. But hey, you might find one on eBay that you could give it a go.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=980378

if that rumour plays out that Other World Computing may carry it. http://www.macsales.com

Arvald wrote:

if that rumour plays out that Other World Computing may carry it. http://www.macsales.com

I found this and it looks like what I may be looking for, especially given that it is small enough to fir an iPod Classic. Has anyone found it to work?

I repaired an older one with a CF drive using a kit that Amazon sells. Not sure if it supports higher than 64GB though.

But let me tell you... getting an ipod open is a B * T * H.

It has been proven possible, but why an SSD? Isn't that a lot of cost for a player like the Classic?

tipoo wrote:

It has been proven possible, but why an SSD? Isn't that a lot of cost for a player like the Classic?

Not sure how much performance gain you'd actually notice in an iPod by using SSD anyway... seems like if you really need that much storage, you can buy a HDD for a fraction of the cost of SSD, and the end results would be pretty close to the same.

Ipods are meant to be portable. The only problem is that when you play a Classic in a car and there are joints in the road, the HDD will skip. That is impossible with any kind of flash memory (SSD included). That is the point of the original post.

riviera74 wrote:

Ipods are meant to be portable. The only problem is that when you play a Classic in a car and there are joints in the road, the HDD will skip. That is impossible with any kind of flash memory (SSD included). That is the point of the original post.

Sure, and how much would a 256GB SSD cost you? You may as well get another flash based player perhaps with expandable storage at that point.

riviera74 wrote:

Ipods are meant to be portable. The only problem is that when you play a Classic in a car and there are joints in the road, the HDD will skip. That is impossible with any kind of flash memory (SSD included). That is the point of the original post.

iPods have buffering. There should be no skipping unless you're driving on railroad ties or cross-country.

Assuming that your library will fit, you would have fewer headaches if you get an iPod Touch or iPod Nano.

BIF wrote:

riviera74 wrote:

Ipods are meant to be portable. The only problem is that when you play a Classic in a car and there are joints in the road, the HDD will skip. That is impossible with any kind of flash memory (SSD included). That is the point of the original post.

iPods have buffering. There should be no skipping unless you're driving on railroad ties or cross-country.

Assuming that your library will fit, you would have fewer headaches if you get an iPod Touch or iPod Nano.

Right. The hard drive doesn't spin constantly, feeding pieces of the song as it plays. The device loads multiple songs into memory, spins down the hard drive, and pays through them. Then when the queue is getting near the end, spins it up and loads more songs.

The only hard drive jitter you have to worry about in this case is when it's loading more music. If you had such a jittery environment that it wasn't able to reload the queue before it emptied, you could get some skipping and other artifacts.