After 2 years of heavy hard drive use, my 30GB 3G iPod died last week. The iPod itself is fine, but the hard drive is toast. Luckily I was able to pull most of my important files off (some of them one at a time). Right now the guys ate iPodMods are fixing it for me.

Why did this happen? I wasn't just using my iPod for playing music. I was transporting large amounts of files everyday to and from work and even capturing DV video to my iPod. I also kept my iPod mounted to my computer all day and played music off it. As I later learned, this is not exactly a smart move. Over time I basically grinded my iPod's hard drive into the dirt. So please learn from my mistakes. Try to use your iPod mostly for music and not for massive and frequent file transports.

I mailed my iPod off iPodMods to get fixed but I still need a portable hard drive to shuttle files back and forth with me everyday. I needed a small and reliable drive that I can use with both Macs and PCs. I also wanted one made by a very well known hard drive manufacturer. My data is very important to me and spending a little extra for a quality hard drive is well worth it in the long run. I had a bad experience with a cheap Maxtor hard drive before and will never buy a crappy drive for my data again. After an extended search I found the perfect match: the Seagate Pocket Hard Drive.

The Seagate Pocket Hard Drive is a standard high-speed USB 2.0, bus-powered device. It provides a true "plug and play" connection that supports hot plugging so you can connect or disconnect the drive even when your computer is on. The drive receives power directly through the USB connector so there is no need for an external power source or batteries.

The high-speed USB 2.0 is backward compatible with the older USB 1.1 standard. However, USB 1.1 only supports transfer rates of 12 Mbits/sec. To take advantage of the speed of your Pocket Hard Drive, connect it to a computer that supports high-speed USB 2.0 connections. High-speed USB 2.0 supports data rates up to 480 Mbits/sec (40 times faster than USB 1.1). You can save any type of data and files on the device including text, graphics, programs, music, and even multimedia files.

This hard drive is big on storage but small in size. If you are looking to put fewer "hard drive miles" on your iPod, then definitely look into getting an alternate portable data drive. Seagate is well known for their quality drives and products and the Pocket Hard Drive gets the job done at a great price.