War Stories: What did you do to your ipod?
Perhaps this has been discussed before but I dont see it in the topic lists..
Im a new ipod (Version 2 actually) owner and Id like to get a bit of an idea and perhaps a bit of a laugh what an ipod can take, hardware wise..
So, post here what you did to your ipod, and what it survived and what it died of. Did you drop it on concrete and did it still work? Did you zap it with 220V? Did your gf shout at you for liking the Pod more than her and throw it against the wall? (and was it dead afterwards? Did you throw her after? ;) ) Do tell!
[557 byte] By [
puntloos] at [2007-11-9 12:37:54]
# 1 Re: War Stories: What did you do to your ipod?
I dropped my 10 GB 3rd gen. on the ground more then once. I freaked out but nothing ever happened. I didn't have it long enough for much else to happen. At a 4th of July BBQ a girl was being dragged to the pool to be thrown in and I ran up to take her phone off her belt and ask if she had anything else in her pockets.... I even took her shoes off ... then her boyfriend ran up and pushed us all into the pool. I came up 3 seconds later reaching up out of the water with my iPod. It was too late. The screen was filled with water. After a few attempts at opening it I decided to instead let a blow dryer blow on it at full blast on the counter in the bathroom. I fell asleep and woke up an hour later with part of the case warped and melted. Whoops. I'm not sure now that I opened it if it was the water that fried it all up or the intense heat. It was a work pic nic and my boss said not to worry about it they'd give me $300 to replace it. I went out and got the 30 GB model ....this time at Best Buy with a 4 yr plan ... and it was an open box model... the only thing done to it was it was formatted for windows then returned, but they gave me 10% off of it.
Here's hoping I won't need the 4 yr plan....
# 2 Re: War Stories: What did you do to your ipod?
Hmm its good to hear that it won't break after coughing on it. On the other hand the ipod HDD was probably not spinning at the time. Part of the design to be sure, the drive only spins as long as it needs to get the next 32Mb or something to buffer
You know the entire concept of knocking a harddrive around (even a LITTLE bit) while its operating is boggling my mind.. So JOGGING with it? Eek! - Im a system administrator and microelectronics person by the way.
Without going into too much detail most common harddrives work on the principle of the HDD heads being suspended in mid air (usually they -count- on gravity to pull the head into place, so even holding drives upside down is a bad idea!) by the airflow the rotating disk generates. The head is supposed to be close to but NOT touching the platter by fractions of a millimeter. Now even the slightest bump could theoretically make the head bounce onto the platter thereby damaging it like you would damage an audio tape by dragging a piece of metal across it.
I suppose I shouldn't be too twitchy about all this, seeing that the things evidently don't break so much as to cause an uproar but Im surprised there aren't more cases of damaged drives just by running.
How many people amongst you use the ipod to jog -regularly-? How long have you used it? Call me mr. curious..
# 3 Re: War Stories: What did you do to your ipod?
...about the drive most likely not spinning at the time. I'm pretty curious how they get around the seemingly glaring contradiction of carrying around a HD for all the 'active lifestyle' activities the iPod is marketed toward. Though I only had a lowly job testing HDs in the clean rooms of IBM after they were assembled, I remember it being common for one to get damaged very easily, simply by tapping it with a tool to roughly.
Also, because my 10 GB 3rd gen iPod fell into a pool (RIP... and was replaced with a 30 GB one) I've been able to open it up and play around... the HD is so thin... thinner then I expected. I can't even imagine the width of the platters and heads within it much less the space between them. Are these hard drives commonly used for other applications? How widespread are they? I doubt they engineered and produced them just for Apple, but were they engineered with some way to prevent head slapping in mind?
Or is it the fact that the HD is not accessed so often outside of syncing at the desk that they are just playing the odds against enough damage to be noticable in a given length of time?
