Like many of us, I had an old iPod, the type with a hard drive, sitting in a drawer.  It was in that state of “nearly dead” that so much electronics seems to end up in.  It sort of worked.  The hard drive would sometimes not spin, and need a gentle nudge, which is a pain when the iPod is designed to spin it up and down to save battery power.  The 80GB capacity was also no longer sufficient for my music collection.  And so it sat in a drawer, like a forgotten zombie.

Then one day eBay, after I’d been looking for a solid state drive to extend the life of another computer, proposed an SSD for an iPod.  I started to wonder, could that work?  How hard was it to dismantle an iPod?  iFixit, as usual, had a brilliant step-by-step guide on their web site https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPod+5th+Generation+%28Video%29+Hard+Drive+Replacement/607   It looked difficult, but not impossible.

So I got started.  In 30 minutes, working carefully (as iFixit said A LOT), I managed to replace the hard drive without damaging anything else.  Connecting the upgraded iPod to my macbook got the firmware installed and my music restored to it.  With a 240GB SSD, I can now have all of my music, it’s faster to respond than it was before, the battery lasts longer because there’s no spinning disk, and it’s only about half the weight it was.

We have a complete set of iPod/iPad/iPhone opening tools in the Fablab.