Replacement battery: This is an optional item I found that our original battery was in good shape, especially given the much lower current draw inherent to the SSD. I chose a Tarkan Akdam mSATA board, which fitted our seventh-generation iPod, was beautifully made and was compatible with all the mSATA SSDs I tried. Bear in mind that you’ll need a small pile of boards and parts to make the mSATA drive usable from a Windows PC so that the vital last step of formatting the card to suit the iPod’s needs can be completed.

You can opt for boards that use CompactFlash (CF) or mSATA storage formats: CF has the advantage that most home users will have a card reader that will take the CF card straight away mSATA has the rather different advantage of going up to a whole terabyte of storage. Be aware, though, that some are missold on the big auction/buying sites, with sloppy vendor descriptions written by people who haven’t actually tried the upgrade themselves. ZIF converter board: There’s a rich variety of these. You’ll need a few other tools, and of course the required upgrade parts, but there’s no soldering required to complete the job, so long as your iPod is functioning (or suffers no greater affliction than a defunct hard drive). The best way to apply the required force is with a wide, flat, thin, springy but strong object – a wallpaper scraper. Using a screwdriver means that your back cover – which is of course already scratched and dented – bends out of shape wherever the screwdriver goes. These either hold on tenaciously or break with a momentum-inducing SPANG, ripping out the delicate headphone-jack ribbon cables and flinging them to the far corner of your workroom. There are tack-welded springs down the inner sides of the back cover. Getting inside one of these things requires some unusual tools. Opening these devices is not for the faint of heart. The other is that the generations of iPod Classics capable of such upgrades are made from lumps of the cast, stamped metal. One issue is that the batteries of a nine-year-old iPod are likely to be somewhat below their optimum capacity. Storage isn’t the only hurdle, of course.

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