iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Chapter 9. The iPod as External Drive

There may come a time when the size of your files grows to exceed the size of a blank CD or 128-megabyte pocket flash drive. For many people, that time is now. Thanks to the boom in digital audio, photography, and video, our supersized files don’t fit on such meager disks anymore, which makes it harder to cart them around from computer to computer.

That’s where the iPod’s most magnificent hidden feature comes into play. Remember that the iPod is essentially, at heart, a hard drive (which is why it can hold so many thousands of songs). Even the tiny Nano is big on the inside, with up to 4 gigabytes of flash memory at your disposal. With a single click in Preferences, in fact, the iPod can turn itself into an external hard drive—a real live icon-on-your-screen hard drive. Depending on the capacity of your iPod—and how much music you have on it—you could easily have a spare 2, 10, or 25 gigabytes of space available for backing up your Documents folder or transporting that 800 MB movie of your baby’s first steps. Before Apple switched its iPod line to USB 2.0 connections in 2005, you could even boot up a Mac from a FireWire-based iPod—something owners of those slightly older models can still do.

The iPod’s Hard Disk Format

The iPod’s drive is formatted in such a way that it can communicate with a computer much like any other hard drive—depending on which model iPod and computer you’re using.

The first iPods, released in 2001, functioned only as Macintosh ...