Lecture me on mp3 harddrives

[erwin1978]

So what's the consensus on the durability of harddrive-based mp3 players? I'm guessing it's not advised to move the unit around when it's running. I mean, with PC harddrives, you're not supposed to bang on your PC when it's turned on coz the vibration will transfer on to the r/w arm of the drive and may damage the disk surface or so I read.

Also, when a diskdrive is spinning and you move the unit around there's a gyro effect experienced and that force on the motor spindle can't be good.

Slightly off-topic, I have a portable radio and during winter with my radio in my coat pocket I get zapped in the ear by static through the ear phones when I move around. Surprisingly my radio is not damaged from this. I'm wondering if this could damage a flash-based mp3 player since its got more sensitive parts on it.

 

[Bigg]

I'm not sure, but wouldn't a hard-drive based MP3 player (i.e. iPod Mini) need a small amount of flash memory to load the MP3 into? So I assume the drive will stop spinning when a song is playing, right?

I just bought a Creative Zen 5GB and plan on receiving it today. Hope I like it.

 

[imported_bum]

Manufacturers advise not to do things like jog or run with hard drive players, but people do it anyway. For the most part I haven't seen it cause any problems. If you really plan to use a hard drive player in constant motion, I guess you should look elsewhere, but for normal use... They will hold up.

 

[stonecold3169]

Well, I can tell you this much...

My buddy went through 2 first gen ipods in a year by jogging with it, trashed the drives in them. Apple replaced the first, but not the second.

It is my undertsanding that they fixed this problem in the 2nd or 3rd generation ipods. My buddy has a 4th gen, and I was suprised, you can FEEL the drive spinning in it. It does buffer it, but it takes longer then I would expect it to to do so, it kicks up for maybe 5-10 second every song. It doesn't sound like much, but if you are running thats quite a bit of jolt to it still. I hear the damping effects are quite efective now though.

For me, I use solid state for exercising. I don;t have a need for that much music when running, and I don;t want to have to worry about maybe breaking my player. I could be way off though, just these are my own experiances