iPod Super

I have a couple of iPods in my desk draw, remainders from the iPod Social Outreach Program. One of them is working, the other has a dead hard drive. Both of them belong to friends and I’d like to return them with a little extra something, actually a big extra something – a very large hard drive.

iPod Super by Collin Allen
iPod Super by Collin Allen (picture copyright Collin Allen)

There are probably many reasons why you may not want a 3.5″ desktop hard drive connected to your iPod, but as soon as I saw Collin Allen’s iPod Super I knew that sooner or latter I’d have to try this for myself.

Obviously the iPod Super is not something you can go jogging with, aside from the size of this thing, sudden up-and-down movements aren’t particularly good for 3.5″ hard drives, and 3.5″ drives need a 12V power supply. But what excites me about this mod is it’s potential for use as a home stereo. There are a lot of iPods out there with dead hard drives, they can easily be found on eBay for under AU$50. Getting a replacement drive for these units however is another story. iPods use tiny 1.8″ drives and these are expensive.

The standard laptop drive is a little larger than the iPods at 2.5″ and desktop drives are generally 3.5″. These dimensions represent the diameter of the rotating disk (platter) inside the drive. Data is stored magnetically on the surface of this spinning platter; large capacity drives require data to be stored at higher densities on the platter and hence need to operate with a much greater degree of accuracy. This relationship between data density and platter size means that as the drives physical size is reduced the amount of data it is capable of storing also decreases, while the cost of the drive increases. This trend is reflected in current hard drive pricing: a 60GB 1.8″ HD costs AU$240, a 60GB 2.5″ HD AU$100, and a 60GB 3.5″ HD AU$50. In reality 60GB 3.5″ drives are no longer available, they have been superseded by higher capacity drives (currently maxing out at about 750GB). The ability to connect 3.5″ hard drives to the iPod means that you can put together a powerful little music player for under AU$100 (and much less than this if you scrounge for parts : ).

The biggest difficulty with this mod is making the adaptor that connects the iPod to the 3.5″ drive (I faced a similar problem during the B&O Mac Mod). Commercial cables for this connection aren’t readily available, so (following in the footsteps of Collin) I decided to make my own. Collin constructed his adapter from a 3G iPod ribbon cable. This approach is limited by the fact that you can only use the adapter with a 3G iPod. I wanted something I could move between different iPod models so I based my adapter on a dead hard drive instead.

dismantled 1.8 HD

I removed the circuit board from the iPod’s dead drive and de-soldered the connector.

desoldering the HD connector

This is a lot easier than you may expect. The circuit bard is quite thin and by gently flexing it while applying heat from a soldering iron the board can be pealed away from the connectors pins. The next step was to solder the 1.8″ connector to a standard 3.5″ IDE cable.

connector with ruler

The 1.8″ connector is tiny, with the pins all routed to one side the pin spacing is a little intense. I decided to bend out the top row of pins to give myself more room. Unfortunately this wire is extremely brittle and the pins broke away as soon as I started to bend them. As a result I had to solder the top row of wires directly onto the back of the connector but aside from this the soldering was relatively easy. Pin layout for ATA/IDE hard drives are basically standard across the 1.8″, 2.5″, and 3.5″ drives, the only significant difference being the power connectors. 1.8″ and 2.5″ drives use 44 pin connectors with pins 41 – 43 (and in some cases pin 44) allocated for power. 3.5″ drives get their power from a separate connector and hence their data cable only has 40 pins. These pins (1 – 40) can be directly mapped from the 1.8″ connector to a 3.5″ drive (this forum post from Warrior_Rocket (post #9) gives a comparison of 1.8″ and 2.5″ pin-outs), the only real concern is making sure the pins stay in the proper order.

pin numbers

These images indicate correct pin placement. For the ribbon cable shown above wire 1 is on the left hand edge, the wires then proceed in order, 2, 3, 4… all the way to wire 40 on the far right. I soldered each of these wires to the appropriate pin on the 1.8″ connector and then covered the back of the connector in hot glue. I also soldered additional wires to pins 41, 42, and 43 on the 1.8″ connector. Pin number 43 is for ground, I will be connecting it to the 3.5″ hard drives ground cable to prevent a voltage differential between the drive and the iPod (I’m not sure if this is really necessary but it wont hurt). Pins 41 and 42 give +3.3V output from the iPod, connecting to these pins is not necessary but I thought they may have some future use. The finished connector looks like this:

finished adapter

Time to test it out. I decided to start small, an old Maxtor 10.2 GB drive (originally from a G4 tower – I think). I stuck the drive in an external USB enclosure and erased it using Disk Utility (1 partition set to HFS) then I connected it to an external power supply, plugged in the adapter and attached a 4G iPod. The iPod booted to the familiar missing folder icon; I connected the iPod to my Mac via the Firewire cable, the iPod restarted in disk mode, and iTunes opened automatically.

iPod with 3.5 HD

iTunes presented me with the “Set Up Your iPod” dialogue box with options to name the iPod and “Automatically sync songs to my iPod”. I turned auto-sync off and clicked “Done”. The iPod appeared under “Devices” in the iTunes side bar and I was able to copy music to the iPod and play music from it however when I ejected the iPod it once again booted to the missing folder icon. Obviously I need to install an iPod operating system.

I decided to use iTunes to “Restore” the iPod (available by clicking on the iPod icon in the Devices side bar). Restoring took about 15 seconds and the iPod automatically restarted in disk mode. I was again presented with the “Set Up Your iPod” dialogue and as before the iPod appeared in the Devices list. I copied some songs to the iPod and clicked eject. This time the iPod started to a menu asking me to choose a Language and after this choice had been made it loaded the standard iPod menu – and everything works. I am able to navigate through the songs, play tracks, all the usual stuff.

working iPod

So it works fine with 10 GB, what about something bigger?

I have a 120 GB desktop drive that’s currently not doing anything, I erased it (again 1 HFS partition with Disk Utility), plugged it in to the iPod, and went through the “Restore” process as above. The restore took about the same amount of time and as before the iPod was fully operational.

drive capacity in iTunes

Checking the drive capacity within iTunes reports 111.54 GB of free space.

drive capacity in iPod menu

The iPods “About” menu shows a hard drive capacity of 111 GB (both these sizes are normal for a formatted 120 Gbyte drive). I don’t have any larger hard drives on hand so I’m not sure if this will work with anything bigger, but I’m guessing it would. If someone tries it with a 750 GB drive then let me know.

For the iPod Super to be truly functional it needs to be integrated into a case, with power supply for the iPod and line out connectors for stereo or speaker hook-up. Other features could also be added, incorporating an Apple (or third party) Dock for example would add remote control functionality. As it stands my iPod Super is no more practical than Collins but now that I have it up and running I plan on changing that.

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