iPod - restore and maximize battery life:
If you erase and add files in a normal manner you will get fragmentation. The iPod hard disk will have to work more to read your music and your battery will suffer.
This needs to be tested, I think: since the update process is initiated by the desktop system, it should be trivial, or even obvious, to ensure that files are written to contiguous blocks.
Apple does not recommend running disk utilities like Norton Speed Disk, Disk Scan and Disk Defragmenter. It’s not really needed as the drive is not written to and erased nearly as much as a typical hard drive. If you’re emphatic about cleaning up your drive it’s best just to do a full Restore with the Apple Software Updater. This reformats the drive (defragmenting it in the process) and has the added benefit of creating a new clean iPod database which over extended periods of use can get corrupted.
I can see how seeking and scanning could run down battery life, but I’m not convinced it’s needed.
2 Comments
I wonder if it might have something to do with how you use your iPod. For people who keep their entire music collection on their iPod, then yeah, they’re not going to see a ton of drive use beyond the seek/scan/read cycle.
Then there’s people like me: with a music collection roughly seven times the capacity of my iPod, my daily listening is through a smart playlist (three stars or better, has not been listened to in the past three months, no Christmas music, 5Gb limit) that gets updated every time I sync. That’s a fair amount of drive access, as songs get added and deleted daily — and while I can’t swear to the fragmentation argument, it makes sense, and I can verify that doing a software restore on my iPod (which is aging, and doesn’t get the battery life it used to) gave my available battery life a nice kick back towards where it used to be.
Interesting: it seems odd that since the iPod doesn’t initiate any writes itself (you don’t create files with it), that writes aren’t optimized. UNIX systems don’t suffer from disk fragmentation to the same degree as DOS-based systems, so it’s not like no one at Apple knows how to do this.
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