TL;DR: You can use a very cheap ZIF to Micro SD adapter on a 5th (and probably others) gen iPod, and with some thin paper/tape and some good timing, you too can have a budget solid state storage upgrade.
I only ever buy pretty out of date phones. My latest purchase, the Google Pixel 6, has introduced me to the wonderful world of not having 3.5mm headphone jacks on anything, and I have to say:
I hate it.
I realize I'm late to the party here, but I don't know how you fucking people have been suffering like this for so long.
Anyway, I realized that I have an old Ipod Classic 8K7111ZMV9N (5th gen, late 2006, thin variant) sitting in my dead-ipods-I've-been-collecting-for-years drawer. This bad boy features both a dead battery and a woefully small 30gb hdd of unknown alive-ness.
Given that I now need a dedicated music player, I decided to see if I could get this thing up and running on the cheap.
Knowing how annoyingly hard iPods are to open, I decided I'd solve both ailments at the same time:
- A new battery, and
- Upgraded storage.
My goal is at least 128gb of storage (though more is always welcome), and as big a battery I can possibly get for under $15 canadian.
The battery is easy. I found this ridiculously oversized 3000mAh thing on Ali for ten bucks. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006472709758.html
There are other listings of the same/similar products, just be sure you get one with the correct dimensions for your iPod. Some listings will specifically sell a 'thin ipod' or 'thick ipod' variant.
At the time of writing, I haven't figured out how to close the ipod back up with this thing installed, but I think it's a job for the dremel. That might be another post.
EDIT: I made it fit with the slim back plate.
There's a small magnesium indent/clip on the inside of the case that normally holds the hard drive in place, separating it from the 'battery' compartment. By very carefully cutting and sanding that bit down, it creates enough room for the huge battery to sit flush with the pcb and screen. From there, the ZIF-to-microSD adapter just sits right on top of the battery (ideally covered in kapton tape to avoid shorts, and a bit of that blue foam to dissuade any sharp edges from puncturing the battery), and the slim back shell clips back into place nicely.
The original harddrive in the iPod is a Toshiba 1.8" spinnin' disk platter dealie with some 40-pin connector referred to as """ZIF""".
Okay, straightforward enough. I need a female-"ZIF" to Micro SD adapter. There's probably plenty of cheap options, right?
Not really, no.
As far as basically everone on Reddit is concerned, there's only one option: A small business manufacturing little PCBs with ZIF-in on one side and SD/Sata/CF on the other known as iFlash
That would work, but they want 40 USD plus S&H. I could get a high quality pair of knockoff airpods for that.
No thanks.
Instead, I went digging through the sewers of AliExpress for my salvation. And behold: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007126191726.html
This little guy will run you less than a tenner and includes TWO micro-sd card slots (though I was only able to get one work to work with a 128gb card. Probably user error, or maybe the adapter has a capacity limit? Not sure.)
The microSD is (likely) a knockoff "Kodak" 128gb Micro SD from AliExpress. It passes H2Testw. I'm happy with it for 8 bucks. I'm not going to post the link though as AliExpress sellers have a bad habit of bait-n-switching listings and I don't want to accidentally point you to some lower-capacity-than-advertised data-incinerator.
protip: If you're new to buying storage on Aliexpress, look for listings with multiple people speaking informally and/or with regional colloquialisms in their native language, posting positive CrystalDiskMark and H2Testw test results.
Once my ingredients arrived, I tore open the iPod, stuck in the new battery, stuck the SD card into the ZIF adapter, plugged the ZIF adapter into the ipod. And boom: It wouldn't boot.
No amount of fiddling and fucking around with reseating the flex cables or charging with different ipod cords helped. It was complaining that "Please wait. The battery is uhhh, too low [sic]" and it wasn't going to move on.
Turns out that was a red-herring. That sometimes happens if the hard drive isn't working as expected.
So I stuck the thing on the shelf for 8 months and bought a pair of knockoff airpods. And I suffered. I suffered for so long.
But today I've decided to try again, and thanks to the gracious documentation of two incredible human beings, we have done it.
Turns out, there were two major issues that plagued my endeavor:
I noticed that despite the flip lock on the ZIF slot on the adapter being closed down on top of the cable, the cable was incredibly loose, and could slide out with the slightest tug.
AliExpress reviewer "J***s" notes in his review of the ZIF to Micro SD adapter [1]:
"It works well for ipod. The connection ribbon fits lose, you need to stick some tape in the back of the ipod ribbon for a perfect fit"
— J***s
Whoah! That simple? Okay.
I found some wax-coated paper in my random-shit drawer and cut it to the exact width of the ZIF slot.
With the ipod face-down on my desk, I placed the zif-to-sd adapter on top of the battery, with the SD slots facing up.
I then slid the paper shim into the ZIF slot on the adapter, then wedged the ZIF cable in on top and closed the flip lock.
Give it a slight tug to see if it's still loose.
You may need to try with some slightly thicker paper, or just use tape like J***s suggests.
The correct configuration should be obvious if you note where the contacts on the zif cable are exposed. Don't cover the contacts with the paper.
If you did it right the ZIF cable should not come free from light pulling.
At this point, we're almost in business. Praise J***s. The iPod is now at least booting past where it would before. The battery isn't complaining any more, it's mounting as a storage device on my windows computer and iTunes is detecting it, albeit as a broken iPod in need of restore.
I think the title of this section is kinda giving it away, but in case you couldn't guess: Restoring it with itunes does not work. It enters what's called a "Restore Loop" where itunes factory resets the pod, the pod reboots, and when it comes back to life itunes says it needs to be restored again, GOTO 10.
I thought I could perhaps bypass the whole thing at this point and just install rockbox, but I don't think RockBox will install on an iPod that isn't already in a functioning state. How annoying.
Anyway, this is where shit get's really weird.
After a few hours of messing around with partition manager and restoring the iPod two dozen times, following various dead-end guides and getting incredibly frustrated, I found the solution for Windows machines. Big shout out to the kindest soul in the world: Reddit's very own KamenRiderFaizNEXT [2].
- Download Aomei Partition Assistant (they have a free version, it works fine for what you need it for here)
- Kill iTunes (Like, kill the process from Task Manager) and the associated "iPod Service" process.
- Plug in your iPod.
- Open AOMEI up and find your iPod's mounted disk. Right click on the disk (not the partition, which is probably broken), and select "Rebuild MBR". Click the
Applybutton at the top left to actually run the command. - At this point your disk will probably be showing an empty drive with a single, unformatted volume. Right click on the volume and click "Create Partition."
- Format the whole thing as Fat32. Click
Okay, and then clickApplyagain to apply your changes. - Close AOMEI.
- Now, just to be safe, let's reboot the ipod.
- Now start Itunes. It should detect your ipod and tell you it's fucked and ask you if you want to restore it. Don't restore it just yet, we'll get to that.
FOLLOW THESE NEXT STEPS VERY CAREFULLY. ACTUALLY READ THIS PART. - Start Aomei again. Right click on the iPod's disk and click
Rebuild MBR. ClickApply, BUT DO NOT ACTAULLY START THE JOB YET. Just sit there with the window open, ready to be started at a moment's notice. - From iTunes, start the restore process on your iPod.
- Keep both the restore progress bar and the
Applybutton very visible on your screen at the same time. - Try to time it so that as soon as the iTunes restore progress bar reaches 100%, you click the button in Aomei to actually start the Rebuild MBR process. The goal here is to rebuild the MBR right after iTunes restores the iPod's software, but before the iPod reboots. Timing is very important here, and you might not get it right the first time. If you fail, start again from step 1.
- If you were succesful, the iPod should actually boot into the iPod menu, and not a recovery screen.
Congratulations, your iPod should now work!
