[danengel]

I'd love to buy the new nano, but my old G4 has only a USB 1, not USB 2. Will this work?

[mduell]

Yes it will work. A 4GB nano will take about 2-3 hours to fill over USB1.

[imitchellg5]

Originally Posted by mduell

Yes it will work. A 4GB nano will take about 2-3 hours to fill over USB1.

Or longer depending on your G4's speed.

[danengel]

Originally Posted by imitchellg5

Or longer depending on your G4's speed.

I have the dual 1.25 GHz G4, the fastest ever!

[badsey]

I had an iPod Shuffle 512Mb and trying to fill that thing on USB 1 was absolutely horrible(USB 1.0 not 1.1). But that was a Windows machine. Try getting a USB 2.0 card for that Mac.

standard parallel port: 115kBYTES/s (.115MBYTES/s)
Original USB: 12Mbits/s (1.5MBYTES/s)
ECP/EPP parallel port: 3MBYTES/s
IDE: 3.3-16.7MBYTES/s
SCSI-1: 5MBYTES/s
SCSI-2 (Fast SCSI, Fast Narrow SCSI): 10MBYTES/s
Fast Wide SCSI (Wide SCSI): 20MBYTES/s
Ultra SCSI (SCSI-3, Fast-20, Ultra Narrow): 20MBYTES/s
UltraIDE: 33MBYTES/s
Wide Ultra SCSI (Fast Wide 20): 40MBYTES/s
Ultra2 SCSI: 40MBYTES/s
IEEE-1394: 100-400Mbits/s (12.5--50MBYTES/s)
Hi-Speed USB: 480Mbits/s
Wide Ultra2 SCSI: 80MBYTES/s
Ultra3 SCSI: 80MBYTES/s
Wide Ultra3 SCSI: 160MBYTES/s
FC-AL Fiber Channel: 100-400MBYTES/s

[badsey]

There are several different editions of the USB standard that have been released:

USB 1.0, the first edition, was released in January 1996. It supported 1.5 Mb/s (low speed) and 12 Mb/s (high speed) transfer rates. Note that this is Megabits per second and not MegaBytes per second -- a common misunderstanding. A percentage of this data rate is reserved for USB protocol overhead, so the actual data transfer is less than the indicated speed. How much less depends on the transfer type and the packet sizes.

USB 1.1 was released in September 1998. This edition fixed many of the problems in release 1.0.

USB 2.0 was released in early 2000 and has increased the maximum transfer speed by a factor of 14 up to 480 Mb/s! USB 2.0 is backwards compatible with USB 1.x. Although the USB 2.0 specification has been released, operating programs for personal computers are not expected to have USB 2.0 support until about the fourth quarter of 2001. A few peripherals supporting USB 2.0 have already begun to show up on the market in late 2000.

http://www.sss-mag.com/usb.html

[danengel]

But why does Apple say you need USB 2 for the nano? This scares off many potential customers. Sure it's slow over USB 1, but better a slow iPod than none at all.

[badsey]

you really need USB 2.0 (or firewire) to fill these things. The USB 2.0 cards are so cheap you should think about getting one. USB 1 is very poor and will drive you nutz. Try USB 1.0 and it should work, but get that USB 2.0 card when you can.

[imitchellg5]

Originally Posted by danengel 

I have the dual 1.25 GHz G4, the fastest ever!

2nd fastest. They had a dual 1.42GHz when the G5s came out

[brassplayersrock²]

Originally Posted by badsey 

you really need USB 2.0 (or firewire) to fill these things. The USB 2.0 cards are so cheap you should think about getting one. USB 1 is very poor and will drive you nutz. Try USB 1.0 and it should work, but get that USB 2.0 card when you can.

nanos dont work with firewire, hmm, or is that the other way around?

[badsey]

Firewire To Usb Cable - Cables & Adapters - Compare Prices, Reviews and Buy at NexTag - Price - Review

[ghporter]

You need FAST connections to fill up 4-8GB of storage. And Apple doesn't want to hear a bunch of whining to the effect of "your product is SOOOO SLOW!!!" so they say USB 2.0 is required. But if you know anything about USB, you know that the only real difference for a user is speed, so something "requiring" USB 2.0 should raise a flag that says "slow connections will take a long time."

[kaszeta]

As an owner of a 512mb shuffle and a 2GB nano, both synced over USB 1.1 on my TiBook, it's not exactly a fast process. I mostly use the nano for the iPod adapter in the car, so the playlists on it are fairly constant, so it's not too bad, but if you wanted to refill it all the time it would be painful.

[danengel]

So I bought the black nano, and I'm right now syncing it over USB 1. It's sloooow, but it works.

[PBFan]

Right, it does work with USB 1. I just recently got a MBP, but for the last year I used my Nano with my Powerbook G4 1GHz with USB 1. It worked fine. I was really worried that it would be too slow, but even the initial load of the Nano with 500+ songs wasn't that bad. After that it was no big deal at all to keep it updated with podcasts each week.

If you are wondering if USB 1 will work with your iPod, yes, it will. Will it be fast enough? Unless you are really impatient, yes.