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The Guts Of An iPod

Posted by timothy on from the transmit-viruses-to-aliens dept.

The Infamous Grimace writes: "The folks at this Japanese web site have provided pics of the inside of an iPod. A quick breakdown of it in English is here. The FireWire contoller appears to be TIs TSB43AA82, the chip is PortalPlayers PP5002B w/ an ARM7TDMI-based core. Apparently it has encoding abilities as well. The hard-drive is Toshiba's MK5002MAL."

3 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. iPod price vs. Toshiba drive price by Olentangy · · Score: 5, Informative

    I followed the link to Toshiba site. They will sell me the 5 GB little hard drive for $399 retail. Apple will sell me a complete iPod for $399.

    If anyone wants the Toshiba drive, they should buy an iPod and rip it apart. This gives them the drive, PLUS you get a battery, various ICs, an LCD display, and some decent earbuds :-)

    Guess Apple's price for the iPod isn't really a rip off.

    -- Olentangy

    1. Re:iPod price vs. Toshiba drive price by MinusOne · · Score: 5, Informative

      > Um, dude, look on pricewatch at the prices for 2.5" IDE drives. Like $150 for a 30gb.

      Yeah, too bad this is a 1.8" drive - much smaller. 5GB is currently the highest capacity Toshiba makes.

  2. Drivers possibilities for Linux by mbrubeck · · Score: 5, Informative
    For users wanting to play with the iPod on their Linux box, you'll need hfsplusutils, since there's no fully-working HFS+ driver in the kernel.

    First, of course, you need mount the thing. The documented way to enable Firewire disk mode is through the configuration UI in iTunes, but this TIL article has instructions on how to set Firewire mode manually. Finally you'll need to get it to work with the Linux IEEE1394 drivers. Most Firewire hard drives are already supported, so it may work out of the box. Go to the Linux1394 pages for more information.