Solid State drives and modding a 5th Gen iPod

Easy way to fit a cheap msata SSD into your desktop PC or laptop

Easy way to fit a cheap msata SSD into your desktop PC or laptop

So I picked up a few 256GB solid state drives on a whim.  Its time to upgrade some of the older drives around the house in the PC’s which need the capacity.

This time, I decided to just buy msata drives, and use more mSATA to 2.5″ adapters to fit them into desktops and laptops.  These adapters are handy, and this way I get the flexibility to use the msata drives in other devices too like one of these mSATA to USB 3.0 enclosures.  Its worth pointing out I’ve tried a couple of the adapters on the market, and this type is my preferred – the other one I used didn’t give as good throughput, whilst this type just runs the SSD as if it was a regular SATA drive.

Incidentally, this also free’s up a 60G SSD with which to upgrade the Myth box, so I’ll be pulling apart the system on this page, and replacing it with some newer hardware, in a post during September.

So why do I mention iPod’s in the page title?..

Well, I also grabbed one extra 256G SSD to do an experiment with.. I’ve been wanting to try out using ALAC (Apple lossless format) instead of FLAC for a while, to simplify carrying music in the car, as lets face it, lots of cars and stereo’s have iPod playback/control built in, and almost none have FLAC support.

So I picked up a 5.5-gen (late 2006) iPod off ebay to experiment with.  Yes, an old old iPod, but they’re also the last ones to use the acclaimed Wolfson DAC, so for interfaces which can’t read the digital stream, it should sound better too.  And here’s the result (I’ll post a write-up of the parts with pictures and steps when the parts arrive for the next one).

Yes, a 5.5 gen iPod with a 256G SSD inside it.  It all fits, using plug and play parts!

Yes, a 5.5 gen iPod with a 256G SSD inside it. It all fits, using plug and play parts!

4 thoughts on “Solid State drives and modding a 5th Gen iPod

  1. Pingback: iPod 5th gen SSD upgrade - My Wired House

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