What To Do With Your Old 4th Gen iPod Classic

I have an old 4th generation iPod Classic* sitting on its cradle on my computer desk collecting dust for I don’t remember how long. I don’t know whether to sell it or throw it away. Who would want to buy this piece of junk anyway? Most of it still works fine, yes, especially its function to play and manage the MP3 files in it. The only thing is that the battery won’t last longer than a few minutes of playtime. I do have a spare battery for this sad dinosaur lying here somewhere (I have yet to find it), but never got to use it. The iPod is hard enough to open and I’ve been trying so hard I just got tired, never even coming close to prying loose the damned thing just a tiny bit.

Like I said, this iPod has been sitting on my desktop for so long. I’ve totally forgotten about it until today. I needed to copy the Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes animated series from a friend’s laptop. It’s an easy 7GB file(s) and while I could have it burned to a 8GB DVD, I really don’t want to connect my DVD writer to my computer. Besides, reading from DVD is too slow. So I needed a portable disk or a high-capacity flash drive to copy the files. My 4GB flash drive wasn’t enough. Bringing my 500GB internal drive was not an option. (And don’t tell me to buy a real portable drive! It is not an option too. Not with my finances right now. LOL!)

So I had a great idea. Suddenly, the dusty, now off-white iPod was shining brightly behind the stacks of books and papers on my table. Why not use the iPod as my portable storage device? YES, that would be the answer to my predicament. Wooo! This old iPod has a use after all!

I plugged it into my computer. After a few minutes of charging, the thing came to life! Ubuntu detected the iPod, promptly asking me what to do with it (if there was a `rm -rf the shit out of it` option I would’ve chosen it). Surprisingly enough, there are about 2GB cache of music in it. Over 17GB of unused space! More than enough to copy the series twice! Weeee.. .

You’ve got to hand it to the iPod. Not only is it an innovatively brilliant piece of multimedia device, it also doubles as a “portable disk” nicely!

* It should be noted that the filesystem used on this device is the old FAT32. Files with sizes over 4GB can’t be copied over. It’s a filesystem limitation.

**iPod Classic screenshot from Wikipedia.

 

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Notice: This article was published on November 28, 2010 and the content above may be out of date.
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