This may seem like a very, very strange way to spend a Friday night but I’m currently defragmenting my iPod. No really.
Via Kottke’s Remaindered Links I found a guide to restoring the battery life of your iPod. The point it seemed to make was that if the files on your iPod are non-fragmented and contiguous, the hard disk does not have to work as hard to serve up the data and therefore it uses less battery power.
The guide is aimed at Mac users, so on the PC I decided to use good ol’ Disk Defragmenter to reorganise the files into a better order and defragment the database file which was in two pieces. Whether this will actually improve the battery life or not remains to be seen but it’s worth a try.
Before you all jump out of the woodwork and recommend a better defrag tool, please bear in mind that the disk layout isn’t that bad as it is. I don’t think Diskeeper or any of the commercial defraggers would make much of a difference here somehow.
incidentally, it’s about this time last year that I wrote about iPod’s Dirty Secret – a short film about how an 18-month-old iPod was suffering acute battery problems. Subsequent iPods have seen considerable battery life improvements, which is good.
Defragging your iPod
November 26, 2004
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
November 28, 2004 at 00:49
iPod – restore and maximize battery life
HowTo (via Neil’s World – Defragging your iPod)
December 20, 2004 at 03:10
Defragmenting an iPod
Neil’s World – Defragging your iPod. Well, the whole iPod seems shrouded in mystery is actually just a FAT32 file system with some magic directories. If you plug the iPod into a PC, it comes up as a hard drive. iTunes also comes up, but you can actuall…