I read a blurb some weeks back on replacing the hard drive in an iPod mini with a flash card of the same size or larger. A busted mini arrived today and it seems that the drive is the problem. Amazing little things, those microdrives.
But in hunting up a new drive to put in it, I never expected the microdrives to be cheaper than the flash drives. I’m not that wedded to the idea of a flash drive, since one of the big arguments is that it would be cheaper as well as more durable. I’m inclined to go ahead and put in another microdrive and let it go until it fails: who knows how big and cheap flash cards will be then?
<update> Well, I just scored a 6Gb MicroDrive from an iPod mini, and I have a couple others I have an eye on.