Limitations of Flash

Any piece of electronics you purchase will eventually wear out. Hard drives die eventually. Entropy wins in the end. The likelihood is that there will be a newer, cooler, cheaper iPod which you will buy long before the flash drive in your Nano gives up.

If you want small and light (and you think you may want to exercise with it) buy the Nano. If you want the greatest capacity, buy the Classic. Then, enjoy your toy and don't stress about 100,000 write-erase cycles or the mean time to failure of the hard drive.

Abelgri wrote:
"Another limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles (most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 100,000 write-erase-cycles for block 0, and no guarantees for other blocks[citation needed]). This effect is partially offset by some chip firmware or file system drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping the blocks in order to spread the write operations between the sectors; this technique is called wear levelling."

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Limitations

Oh dear... So after a lot of use my Nano will be useless?

Should I get a Classic then?

I believe the numbers you are quoting there from Wikepedia are for NOR-based flash which has an endurance of 10,000 to 1,000,000 erase cycles (thats a huge range).

NAND flash which is used for storage devices has an endurance of 10X that. As that same Wikepedia article claims "The endurance of NAND flash is much greater than that of NOR flash (typically 1,000,000 cycles vs. 100,000 cycles)."

Batteries also have a finite number of cycles for which they can be recharged. That will in all likelihood be the first thing to go on a flash based iPod.:)

Abelgri wrote:
Thanks...:)

So Hard Drives give out too? Faster?

I mean those ARE mechanical right?

Sure. Like anything mechanical Hard Drives have a life expectancy. Particularly when you spend your life spinning at thousands of RPM's.

I am not sure what hard drives the current iPod Classics use. I know mine has a Toshiba drive in it. These drives are supposedly rated for 5 years or 20,000 power ON hours.

How that compares to 1 million cycles on NAND Flash memory I honestly don't know. I have yet to have a Compact Flash card fail on me yet for my Camera and those get filled and wiped far more often than my Nano.

Hard Drives are also of course more susceptible to damage from shock such as dropping.

Abelgri wrote:
NANO IT IS THEN!!! 🙂

If Nano is what you are looking for then buy a Nano!

I wouldn't worry about buying one over the other based on hard drive vs. flash. As Meg above mentioned either one will probably outlive its usefulness. You will likely be bored of it and want something new long before it dies.

I still have a couple older iPods that work great but I upgraded them anyway 🙂

Really just base your decision on what works for you. Size, capacity, looks, etc.