Apple iPod Essentials   Tracking the Pulse of iPod

When you mount your iPod on the desktop as a hard drive, you can copy anything you want to it. For folks in the computer troubleshooting business, keeping a bootable copy of a System folder and some data recovery tools on your iPod isn't out of the question. And this week Steve Welch of IBM used his iPod Mini to recover a crashed ThinkPad.

"What if I could show you a magic trick that could make the Blue Screen of Death disappear?" Welch said on stage with a ThinkPad that prominently displayed that condition. "Returning us to productivity is what makes this little device really rock," he said, holding up his personal Apple iPod with the software installed on it. The compact IBM Rescue & Recovery On Linux enabled him to instantly access e-mail, Lotus Notes and all the data on his hard drive.

One of the members of the IBM research group working on this technology has a note in his kernelthread.org blog along with a few related links.

Now comes a [dire?] warning reported on Macintouch.com. While you can easily install Mac OS 9/X system software and boot from your iPod, the drives in iPods have a shorter MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures; 300,000 hours [depending on which drive is in your Pod] vs around 750,000 in 2.5" laptop drives) rate than say laptop drives, and running OS X from the Pod for longer periods of time could potentially shorten the life of your favorite MP3 player. In particular, the drive will probably never stop spinning while running OS X (and perhaps OS 9, too), so among other things, you'll cook the little drive since the iPods do not have fans, nor a tongue to pant with.

And here's a little program called iPodBackup that will backup your OS X home directory to your Pod.

Links:
   Toshiba 20gb MK2003GAH 1.8" hard drive
   Toshiba 30gb MK3004GAH 1.8" hard drive