[hellmachine]

hi! i did this some time ago, because this way i was able to log in with my user on the ipod on any machine. syncing work and home wasn't nesessary anymore. but after some time my userfolder got too big and i dropped the concept. now i'm thinking about selling my old ipod and buying a 40gb model.

but how will the userfolder trick work on a daily routine? will the drive suffer? i think not, because the host machine/drive do the work. but who knows for shure?

this concept still has very much potential. all your data everywhere and smaller than a notebook.

last thing i heard was that apple had a prefpane for this feature prepared in the betas of panther but dropped it. bummer...

so, any ideas or experiences to share?

[tooki]

DON'T DO IT!

The iPod is not designed to have the drive undergo heavy use -- it has no cooling, you can fry the drive (people have done it).

If you want that functionality, get a "proper" portable FireWire drive.

tooki

[mdc]

i have to agree with tookie. i heard the very same thing about using your ipod hard disk to often.

[ryju]

Originally posted by tooki:
DON'T DO IT!

The iPod is not designed to have the drive undergo heavy use -- it has no cooling, you can fry the drive (people have done it).

If you want that functionality, get a "proper" portable FireWire drive.

tooki

100% correct. I actually ran OS 9 off of my iPod which was the worst mistake of my life. Thankfully a couple iPod FREEZES was enough of a warning for me to format the thing and just keep music on it, I could have been really screwed if I kept that on there.

[hellmachine]

thanks for your input. but one thing i wanna make clear:
you know the difference of running a complete system on the ipod and running the user folder from there?

when you run a complete system on the ipod it will die with guarantee, because it got used like a regular drive with heavy read/write, virtual memory swapping and the like...

when you run a user folder on the ipod the drive use is quite small, because the main system runs on the hostmachine. everything happens there while only settings and prefs got touched on your ipod, mostly only a few times per day.
when you open files on the ipod these will use the drive and got loaded into ram. when you save it will use the drive again.

my question is:
will even this small usage hurt the ipod?
more details under:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...20118085624228

[::maroma::]

Either way, I wouldn't risk it.

[CatOne]

Originally posted by hellmachine:
thanks for your input. but one thing i wanna make clear:
you know the difference of running a complete system on the ipod and running the user folder from there?

when you run a complete system on the ipod it will die with guarantee, because it got used like a regular drive with heavy read/write, virtual memory swapping and the like...

when you run a user folder on the ipod the drive use is quite small, because the main system runs on the hostmachine. everything happens there while only settings and prefs got touched on your ipod, mostly only a few times per day.
when you open files on the ipod these will use the drive and got loaded into ram. when you save it will use the drive again.

my question is:
will even this small usage hurt the ipod?
more details under:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...20118085624228

Yes, and with your home folder on the iPod, EVERYTHING you do will access the disk -- if you use mail it will access it for every mail, and if you use Safari it will cache all the pages in there.

The drive will be running > 75% of the time, if you're actively doing stuff.

DON'T DO IT is still the recommendation