How to upgrade an iPod for 2018 with flash memory and a new battery

The Verge‘s Circuit Breakers walks through the process of upgrading and old iPod. It is surprisingly simple to take a 30 GB iPod and make it a 250 GB iPod with a new battery!

If you’re interested in building your own upgraded iPod for yourself, here’s what you’ll need:

An old iPod (a fifth-generation iPod Video works best, and it has the added bonus of offering a Wolfson DAC, which is considered to be the best ever shipped on an iPod)

An iFlash adapter, which houses your SD cards, Compact Flash drives, or SATA drives and connects where your old hard drive used to go (available on eBay)
Some flash memory (either SD, microSD, Compact Flash, or SATA, depending on your personal preference)
A new battery (iFixit is a good place to get reliable ones)
An opening tool to pry open the iPod (again, iFixit has them)
Then, it’s as simple as cracking open the iPod, carefully removing the power and headphone cables, swapping the battery, swapping the hard drive, reattaching all the wiring, and snapping things back together. One quick iTunes restore later, and you’ll be good to go!

If all that seems a little confusing, feel free to follow along with our live run-through in this week’s episode.

You can jump to 18:56 in the Circuit Breaker video to watch the upgrade:

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