Modding : Apple Video Ipod (5g & 5.5g) - The Compact Flash Version
| UPDATE: iFlash iPod CompactFlash adaptor has been launched. More information can be found here. |
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I got into the IPod phenomena very late well actually only a few months back. Everyone around me had these ever so wonderful gadgets and they loved talking about their new found expensive toys.
Did I feel jealous hell no, I have programmed myself to follow the ultimate contrarian life - if it is popular and everyone around me likes it I will always find several reasons why I don’t. With Apple the reasons were pretty clear, I don’t like propriety technology and I don’t like popularity!!! So a few months back I heard these evil words from my wife - why don’t you get me an IPod, before I went in to a rage of rants I decided ok I will.
Being a cheap skate and also having the self believe that I can fix anything, I decided to start my purchasing search in EBay’s faulty and broken categories. While I was searching I noticed that 80 to 90% of faulty video IPod’s seem to suffer from dud hard drives, so popular in fact that it has been coined the ‘click of death’.
Let me remove the wife element of this tutorial - she got her video IPod lovingly restored by yours truly and she is living happily ever after with it!
The Task
So after spending several hours playing with the video IPod and I could feel my hatred for this iconic symbol waning and I did not even have to use their propriety ITunes as someone was good enough to write an excellent Winamp plug-in. However every sound coming from the miniature hard drive working away inside reminded me about the click of death, which is when I decided to find a solution to remove the mechanics from the equation.
I decided the best solution would be to replace hard drive with a solid state alternative in the form of a compact flash card. Various searches later had showed me lots of people had been successful in replacing the HDD in older IPod’s but not the 5th gen video IPod’s, these people should also be put forward for some sort of prize with their amazing hand soldering skills working on 50 way 1.27mm pitch connectors. So no one had cracked the video IPod and this is because of the new fangled connector found on the hard drive, it is zero insertion force (ZIF) type 40 way connector which uses an eye watering 0.5mm pitch.
The installed hard drive is manufactured by Toshiba and a quick search of their website turned up the user manual for the said MK3008GAL drive, thankfully the connector may be different but the signals carried are the same old ATA type. So theoretically it should be no problem interfacing it to a compact flash card.
So after a few hours measuring and prodding with my oscilloscope and going through several pdf’s from SanDisk and Toshiba - finally I came up with a circuit which I felt would do the trick. So now I was left with tracking down the relevant connectors to mate to the IPod and to the compact flash card.
Design
Internally the IPod is extremely well packed and it was pretty much a necessity that my circuit and all its extra’s had to fit in the same form factor as the hard drive I was replacing. The hard drive measures 5mm x 54mm x 71mm, a compact flash card only measures 4mm x 43mm x 36mm so no problem there. Compact flash connectors are pretty much standard things and most measure 47mm wide, once again no problem.
In fact the only place I could see a problem was in the height most CF connectors are 4.5mm and need to be mounted on to circuit board which is going to be 1.6mm in my case. The IPod side was going to be the least to worry about in terms of sizing - the connector is ultra small. 
After spending lots of time flicking though parts catalogues I settled on the connectors, 3M supplied the low profile CF connector (4mm height) and Hirose the 40way 0.5mm ZIF flip-lock connector.
Now I could finalise the circuit board design and get the PCB made. My final design would measure with the Compact Flash card inserted 5.6mm x 51mm x 61mm, great!! Form factor smaller than the hard drive, slightly thicker but that should not matter as I will not be using the rubber mounts that hold the drive.
The PCB finally arrived and the very hard task of mounting the connectors began, these things are designed to be soldered by exotic techniques such as solder reflow and wave ovens - sadly I don’t have luxuries like that so with my trusty hot air soldering station and some solder paste I set to work!!! 
Eureka moment came and went very quickly, after perfectly mounting and soldering the connectors I discovered some errors in how I had routed the tracks - normally at this tiny scale I would have ditched the PCB and ordered new ones, but I was so eager to see if this would work I set about correcting the errors using a magnifying glass and some conductive paint to bond wires (note to self: don’t try this again!). 
As you can see from the images I applied some self adhesive neoprene to the bottom of my circuit board and along the top of the CF connector, these will hold the interface tight when the case is closed. click on images for larger versions.
So the circuit was ready for testing, I won’t bore you with how to open the video IPod several websites already do that and they probably do a better job than I ever could (they can be found here and here.). So I removed the hard drive by lifting the flip lock so the ribbon cable slides out of the connector. I inserted a 4 GB CF card to my module then carefully bought it up to the iPod ribbon cable, sliding slowly in to the ZIF connector once it was home I pushed the flip lock down.
| UPDATE: iFlash iPod CompactFlash adaptor has been launched. More information can be found here. |
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After re-attaching the battery, headphone / hold switch connection and the usb cable. ITunes popped up requesting I restore / update my corrupt IPod which I gladly ok’ed and a few more minutes’ later summary page showed me that I had 3.74 GB capacity. Success was mine!!!!!
Testing
So for testing I decided it would be a good idea to see how the device worked with a slow card and a more modern fast card, obviously I will compare these to the standard hard drive.
My first cheap and cheerful card is the 4 GB Kingston Technology Elite Pro with a 45x speed rating, the faster card is the SanDisk’s 4 GB Extreme III rated at 133x. For transfer rate measuring I am going to use WinAmp 5 installed with the excellent ml-ipod plug-in – mainly because it’s the best non ITunes system and because it displays the average transfer rate while syncing!!
- Standard Hard Drive – 10000KB/s (Peak 11000KB/s)
- SanDisk Extreme III (133x) – 8000KB/s (Peak 8500KB/s)
- Kingston Elite Pro (45x) – 2500KB/s (Peak 2700KB/s)
As you can see the standard hard drive wins, but the story is not that straight forward. What the above table does not show is the fact that you generally have to wait for the hard drive to spin up which I measure to be at least 2 seconds, then it takes a further couple of seconds to get up to speed.
The hard drive transfer rate is also affected by the mix of files, if the files are all very large than you can achieve the above transfer rates. However if you have smaller files than a lot of time is lost to head seeking. I would say in everyday use there is nothing separating the SanDisk from the standard hard drive. I would expect modern 150x cards to have the same transfer speeds as the hard drive.
In use I found both CF cards performed exactly the same, it was impossible to determine which card was installed from using the IPod. Song changes where instant and compared to the hard drive the user experience was smooth as butter, first thing you notice is there is no delays waiting for the drive to spin-up and move the head in to position. 
Visually you can see that the battery is having an easier life, normally with the hard drive you can see a slight dimming of the display backlight during spin-up. I am still testing battery life and I am in the process of making a circuit board with test points so I can take actual measurements.
Until then I would say for someone who leaves the IPod to play continuously without interruption may see an increase of up to 20% play time. On the other hand for someone like me who is constantly adjusting things, fast forwarding through video’s and never can wait till the song finishes to change track will likely expect to see doubling of play time, you may be thinking wild claims but you need to understand Apple uses quite aggressive power saving technique which have been designed assuming you hit play and leave alone.
I would also expect to see greater play time for video’s as I suspect the hard drive is lot more involved during this kind of use. I will update this section after more actual testing. The last difference noticed was how clean it all sounded, on my unit whenever the hard drive was spinning up or just idling the noise floor was much higher (this is probably due to the fact I use earphones which have very good high frequency response.)
Conclusion 
Concluding this article is quite difficult as what I have done while being neat and cool is at the same time not really worth doing. There is a big element of because I can!! Compact Flash cards are still quite expensive and on last checking you can pick up a 16gb 150x OEM card for about £80 ($160) which is about £20 ($40) more than a replacement 30gb hard drive, so it is not value for money.
My personal reason for starting this little project is expectation, I buy my equipment for its functional use – I expect my camera equipment to handle whatever my body handles hiking up a 4000m pass and I also expect the same from my music player. The IPod has been designed with this concept, with its steel backing plate and internal metal frame it is a survivor but sadly as all things it is only as strong as its weakest point – the hard drive.
The major downside is the storage capacity currently limiting you to 16gb which for me is no problem as my needs barely stretch over 6gb but for some 30gb hard drive is the only option. This project also has good side benefits, the extended battery life and smoother user experience is a serious improvement in itself.
Bottom line has to be if money is no object than it is well worth doing this mod!!
PS. My testing has been limited to 4gb CF’s, if someone is willing to donate a 16gb CF for testing (I will return it of course!) it will be much appreciated.
PPS. Several people have asked about the Microsoft Zune players, my internet searches tell me that the same kind of hard drive is used in these as the Video IPod. As my design fits within the size of the hard drive I assume it would work well.
UPDATE: Several people have pointed out this would also probably work in the iRiver DAP’s such as the H10 and most of the other hard drive driven music players. Pros
- Longer Battery Life
- Faster Smoother User Interface
- Solid Sate no moving parts
- Cleaner Sound
Cons
- Expensive
- Limited to 16gb (currently)
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