[feverish]

Ya I see what you are both saying. The 20 mbps figure was a guesstimate as I have never heard of anyone going above 16 mbps. So 20 seemed like a liberal number.

 

[PYROTAK]

lol you silly people!
i was only jesting.

does anyone have the specs on the drive that both the ipod and iriver ihp-120 use?

and the ipod DOES use firewire 1 right?

 

[lindrone]

Quote:

Originally posted by Frenchman As for speed, no. 20mbps (usually lowercase b means bits, btw) is slower then crap. Even if you meant bytes, it's still crap. The current line of Toshiba 1.8in PCMCIA drives are quite fast, 100MBps to be somewhat precise. However, it is quite possible that they have reduced to speed to an acceptable level (20MBps perhaps) in an effort to reduce harddrive wear/tear and battery consumption. Originally these things were marketed as portable drives, and limiting speed helps keep your idiot iPod from running itself out of battery quickly.

The maximum speed is only the speed of the bus, not the speed of the hard drive itself (the 100MB/s with PCMCIA drives). Most hard drives, even today, has a hard time sustaining a 20MB/s transfer rate. Throw in seek time, spin up time, data placement on the hard drive (they're almost never in contiguous blocks), 20MB/s sustained transfer rate is more easily achievable in fast desktop hard drives.

Of course, the number gets bumped up higher in benchmarking programs, because they are using contiguous blocks to conduct most of the test.. they're interested in theoretical limits, because real-world usage would just be too wildly different for any benchmark to have any validity.

All the ratings, ATA100, ATA133, ATA150, all refers to the speed of the bus, in which case if you had multiple hard drives, it will probably eat up most of that bandwidth. It is never in reference to the speed of a single hard drive.

 

[Frenchman]

I don't know what drive the iRiver uses, but assuming it's the same one as the iPod, you can find specs for different ones here:

http://sdd.toshiba.com/cda/main.aspx...00659c000003b7

Click on the 1.8in drives.

 

[lindrone]

Quote:

Originally posted by PYROTAK and the ipod DOES use firewire 1 right?

Yeah, Firewire 800 has a different cable, I don't know if there's any converter cable from old firewire to the new firewire. The controller's supposed to be backward compatible, and I've seen PCI adaptor with both Firewire 400 and 800 ports.

 

[zool]

Hmm, iTunes wont work with my iPod.. Did you guys have to reformat yours when switching from EphPod to iTunes?

I can see the ipod connected in the source bar very swiftly, then it gets removed.

 

[lindrone]

I didn't have to do that when I switched from iTunes to iPod.. but I formatted it anyway. Maybe you should download Software Updater 2.1 first, and use that to reformat your drive.

 

[zool]

I find that if I leave my ipod untouched for like maybe two days.. The battery level has gone down like someone has been using it. I'm pretty sure that no one has used it so this would mean that the battery is still in use when you shut off the unit. Anyone else notice this?

 

[blessingx]

The battery is still used for the clock, etc. but the drain shouldn't be that much after only two days. Note: I only have experience with the older gens.

 

[Dweebgal]

going back to the original question:

when i had an ipod that i had to return (one of the 3 ipods i had becuase i had to keep retunring them incidentally) before it completley died i noticed it was getting very very hot during transfers or charging, so hot that i couldn't hold it, and i was getting the black marks on the screen.

i mentioned this to the apple tech people and they told me that for that reason alone it should be returned for saftey reasons.

they said that it was perfectly normal for it warm up a bit during transfer (becuase of the hard drive spinning up obv.) but that for it to be "too hot to handle"

, was dangerous.

something to bear in mind.