Hack your 4GB iPod nano to 8GB?

We definitely absolutely positively cannot attest to the validity of efficacy of this hack, but word on the street is you can actually solder in a dead iPod nano's guts (namely the Samsung flash chips) to double that storage to 8GB on a formerly 4GB nano -- and the guy who's making the claims is also offering up his services to do so for a paltry $225 (which includes shipping, natch). Buyer / modder / hacker beware -- you know what they say about things seeming too good to be true. That said, anyone given it a go yet?

[Via hack a day]

[Miles Cave @ Jan 12th 2006 1:15PM]

Wow, sounds do-able. but if its that easy, why no offer a 8GB model? Hope it works!

[Mandarin @ Jan 12th 2006 1:20PM]

Kinda pricey isnt it?

[Brian @ Jan 12th 2006 1:23PM]

I wouldn't trust sending this guy anything. The chips he linked to from the website are the wrong ones. He gives a link to the 16Gbit NAND flash, not the 32Gbit. It isn't even that hard to match the chip numbers.



I'd say try it yourself if you have the balls, or just be content with the 4GB nano you already have.

[Mikhail @ Jan 12th 2006 1:26PM]

I'd hate to point out that the cost of this "adventure" slightly exceeds the current street price of a NEW 4GB NANO... So how about you spend $200+ on another nano then use the good ol' trusty ruuber band to hold the two of them together. Thus, not voiding the warranty on either one, of course.

[brandon @ Jan 12th 2006 1:28PM]

It sounds like they add extra flash chips. To add the extra flash clip it would probably add at least another hundred to the cost. I have the 4GB and I don't know if I would pay over $300 for a Nano with 8GB.

[declan @ Jan 12th 2006 1:31PM]

If it's true that would be a wonderful hack. But if it really was that easy why wouldnt Apple do it? There has to be a catch.

[TZK @ Jan 12th 2006 1:33PM]

Looks like all you need is a ribbon cable. Im sure apple gave themselves an easy upgrade path to a 6 or 8gb model.

[Ben @ Jan 12th 2006 1:39PM]

People in the pocket pc world (http://www.pocketpctechs.com) have been doing this style of upgrade for years successfully. So I can't see any reason why it wouldn't work.



It involves 'stacking' the RAM chips on top of each other. I guess the logic inside the chips deals with addressing and access over the same bus. Pretty slick. Plus it uses up barely more space.

[Stephan @ Jan 12th 2006 1:54PM]

No he linked to the correct family just the wrong chip here is the right one...



http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/NANDFlash/SLC_LargeBlock/32Gbit/K9NBG08U5M/K9NBG08U5M.htm



If you look at his hack he clearly has two of the 4GB chips. Also he mentions it only cost $80 for the extra chip...Not to bad considering how much a 4GB compact flash drive goes for....



I imagine we will hear soon from Apple the 8GB nano and the 16GB nano, remember they get these chips for about half as much as any of us can, $250 and $300 respectivly will be Apple's price point.

[PA @ Jan 12th 2006 2:02PM]

Expensive mod for the rich. Have you ever consider buyng a 30 or 60 Gb Ipod for that total price instead? Maybe a bit thicker but an intelligent choice :-))

[Damo @ Jan 12th 2006 2:15PM]

I think the whole reason Apple doesn't do this is because of the limited supply of flash memory.



With every gadget and it's brother including flash memory these days, manufacturers can't keep up with demand.

[Justin McHenry @ Jan 12th 2006 2:18PM]

Haven't seen the inside of the 4GB nano (or the 8GB for that matter), but are those pictures real? Does the 4 gig model just leave an empty space there while the 8 gig uses both spaces? Or would the 4 gig model be built slightly different? I can't imagine Apple would make it that easy for you to monkey with the insides and upgrade it yourself.

[mark @ Dec 22nd 2006 11:34AM]

Yes this is possible and we will have it available soon. Not a high 225 price either :P

[Derek @ Jan 12th 2006 2:18PM]

This brings up an interesting point that I had never thought about before. When you buy a Nano (or any flash-memory device, really), you ACTUALLY get the amount of storage advertised. In other words, aside from the measly memory requirements of the firmware and interface, a 4gb Nano really does have 4 GIGS of storage. The hard-disk based players rip you off with this whole decimal interpretation of what "Giga" means. My "30gb" iPod really only offers about 27gb of storage. One more reason to want a Nano, I guess.



But seriously, that's way expensive and *way* not worth the risk.

[Richard Krehbiel @ Jan 12th 2006 2:33PM]

Ars Technica "destroyed" an iPod nano (see http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/nano.ars) and published pictures of the results. As it turns out, the 2G and 4G nanos use the same printed circuit board, but the nano 2G uses two 1GB flash chips, and the 4GB model uses a single 4GB chip. As a consequence, the 4GB nano has empty pads for the second flash chip. So, hardware-wise, this should be a very do-able mod.

[kdoub1e @ Jan 12th 2006 2:38PM]

Well my 4GB iPod Nano reports Capacity: 3.7GB



Derek, do you own a Nano?

[kdoub1e @ Jan 12th 2006 2:48PM]

Actually, Richard Krehbiel, the 4gb model uses a daughter card attached to the mainboard which holds a single 4gb chip. The arstechnica review smashed a 2gb model only. And if you read the arstechnica review, on the last page they specifically point out this fact. So this guy that has two 4gb chips on one board must have used 3 iPod Nanos. One 2gb model motherboard and two 4gb Samsung chips soldered to it. Below is a picture of a 4gb Nano dissected by another website:



http://www.podupdates.com/uploaded_images/ipn05-781900.jpg

[Omikron @ Jan 12th 2006 3:32PM]

I don't know where all this stuff came about the 4GB Nano using a single chip...I've opened three so far and they all use TWO 2GB chips the daughter board. There is a chip on EACH SIDE.



http://www.podupdates.com/uploaded_images/ipn05-781900.jpg



In that picture, you are only seeing the top chip. There is another 2GB chip on the flip side of that daughter board.

[nullspace @ Jan 12th 2006 3:33PM]

>>

When you buy a Nano (or any flash-memory device, really), you ACTUALLY get the amount of storage advertised.

[nullspace @ Jan 12th 2006 3:41PM]

Sorry, the above should have read:



Derek said:

When you buy a Nano (or any flash-memory device, really), you ACTUALLY get the amount of storage advertised.



and..



The hard-disk based players rip you off with this whole decimal interpretation of what "Giga" means.





In actuality, the reason that there is less than advertised space is because you need to format the storage. This is also true of the flash-based storage devices. My 40GB "Apple iPod Device" actually has a 40GB hard drive in it, but a portion of that is set aside for formatting the drive, leaving something like 37GB available or something like that. The same would happen with a flash player, or any type of flash storage (for instance, my 512MB memory stick actually only has 491MB of available space after formatting).

[Isewise @ Jan 12th 2006 3:48PM]

Where is the screen shot of the nano powered on and actually reporting that there is 7.4gbs available? Hmm....

[Omikron @ Jan 12th 2006 4:47PM]

Okay, there are many inconsistencies in this story:



- All three 4GB Nanos that I have opened to date use a daughter board that has two 2GB flash chips, one on each side of the board.



- The part number he LINKS to is the same part number that is in all of my 4GB Nanos. It is a 2GB part.



- The part number seen in his pictures is a 4GB part number, which can be seen here: http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/common/partnumbersearch.aspx?partnum=K9NBG08U5M&cd1=&x=0&y=0



- If what he claims is true, then that board that he has pictured has FOUR 4GB chips, meaning 16GB of available flash! Don't you think he would have bragged about this if it were possible?



Furthermore:



http://www.public.iastate.edu/~omikron/Shenanigans/MultiArcade/



Those are the pictures that I took just moments ago from my own 4GB Nano. Things don't quite match up to his story, do they?

[Chiablo @ Jan 12th 2006 5:09PM]

Xbox modders have been doing this for a while now. They take the guts of a dead Xbox, remove the ram chips and upgrade the internal memory from 64MB to 128MB.



Now if only it were actually that easy. There are very specific processes you have to go through in order to make it work, and I'm sure there are some later generation iPod mini's that will not let you do this due to restrictions they've put into place.

[Matt @ Jan 12th 2006 5:11PM]

for you idiots:



a 40GB drive is 40,000,000,000B - that's how manufacturers measure, as in 1,000B = 1KB



software measures it as 1,024B = 1KB, so software will report that the drive is smaller. you aren't losing 3GB to formatting, you're losing 3GB due to conversion

[Justin @ Jan 12th 2006 6:12PM]

Umm I had a broken nano sitting on my desk when I read this. There is a daughter card on the 4gb model... not an open memory slot. So my guess is that it would not work. ... now I will neatly put my nano back together and send it to apple for it's broken screen.

[go skinz on the 14th @ Jan 12th 2006 6:18PM]

Well, if you just add $25 on tho that $225 you could buy a new 30 gig ipod video. Sounds kinda stupid to make it that expensive for 4 gigs!!

[damax452 @ Jan 12th 2006 7:16PM]

How come ppl have so much trouble with disk space calculations? When a drive is advertised as, say, 30GB it means 30 billion bytes.



For example, my 120GB WD drive has 120,031,477,760 bytes of capacity. But a Kilobyte is actually 1024 bytes (2^10) and a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes. So that 120,031,477,760 is actually 111.8 GB. But who wants to advertise a 111.8 GB drive. To avoid confusion, drive makers should just give enough capacity so that when you format, the drive actually has the capacity rated on the box.



Check out http://www.techtutorials.net/reference/byteconverter.shtml.



If you are an Engadget reader, then you probably are well aware of this. But just in case.

[Will @ Jan 12th 2006 9:25PM]

"23. for you idiots:







a 40GB drive is 40,000,000,000B - that's how manufacturers measure, as in 1,000B = 1KB







software measures it as 1,024B = 1KB, so software will report that the drive is smaller. you aren't losing 3GB to formatting, you're losing 3GB due to conversion"



This just in... byte =/= bit.

[splintax @ Jan 12th 2006 9:38PM]

23 - glad somebody knows what they're talking about. Didn't it strike anyone as odd that formatting a 30GB drive uses 3GB, and but a 512MB drive only a few megs? If you want to find out exactly how much you lose, type "120 billion bytes in gibibytes" - for example to find the number of gigs available in a 120GB HDD.



Oh, and as for the people saying you should just buy a full-sized iPod, this isn't exactly something the mainstream is going to do, it's more or less something that's just being done because it's "cool" (oh, and the nano is a lot smaller than the full-size iPod, which could be part of the appeal).

[andrew @ Jan 12th 2006 11:54PM]

someone mentioned that he linked to the wrong item since it was a 16Gbit chip, but here's something i just learned recently:



16gigabits = 2gigabytes (since 1 byte = 8 bits).



keep this in mind if you plan on buying any flash chips because they commonly refer to their chips in terms of "gigabits" which is aggrivating to people who are used to "gigabytes".

[xbird @ Jan 13th 2006 1:06AM]

To number 27:



Figure out your basic binary concepts before you attack.



#23 Used GB not Gb, that's GigaBytes, and he never went to bits, he was only dealing with the differences between the decimal and binary definitions of a GigaByte, so the conflict has absolutely nothing to do with 1 byte = 8 bits.



40GB = 40 x 10^9 bytes = 40000000000 bytes = 320000000000 bits

40GB = 40 x 2^30 bytes = 42949672960 bytes = 343597383680 bits



Why is the latter the way programs see it?



First, you need to realize that a byte is not a quantity at all, it is a distinct combination of 8 numbers. Now you can have a quantity of bytes (i.e. 4 bytes) but these are not sequential digits; 4 bytes means 4 DIFFERENT bytes.



In one particular byte, there are 8 binary digits as you see below:

0000 0000, this offers 256 distinctly different bytes.



At this point, a bit is totally irrelevant since a byte is always made of 8 bits, that never changes and a bit in itself is meaningless datawise.



The nearest approximation to 1000 possible distinct types of bytes in powers of two (since binary is a base-2 counting system, meaning it increments in 10's every 2 digits) is 1024 (or 2^10). Sure, we could have wanted it 1000, but bytes are dealt with by programs that count in base-2, and to them:

1000 = 11 1110 1000. Surely not a squarish number to us.



1000 may be easy for us to compute, but since none of us will ever look at the binary, why not leave it a squarish binary number to make it more orderly?

Thus, it happens that 1024 = 100 0000 0000 = 2^10, called 1 KB.



Hence we need to square the amount of distinct bytes to get to 1 MB, or

2^20 and again to get 1 GB, or 2^30 distinct bytes.

[Jon @ Jan 13th 2006 3:26AM]

It should be noted that different hard drive manufacturers convert/round off differently.



For instance, Hitachi drives have (or have at least until recently, I don't have a brand new one) consistently more total storage space than at least Western Digital and Seagate drives. My brother's 120 GB Western Digital is 109 GB whereas my Hitachi 180GXP 120 GB (due for a pension soon) is 115 GB formatted. I'm pretty sure both of these have 2 platters. I've also seen this with some larger Seagate and Hitachi drives of mine, but I forget the numbers.



Note: This is not me advertising for Hitachi.

[Jay @ Jan 13th 2006 9:48AM]

OK...What the hell does 'natch' mean??? I've been reading engadget articles for a few months now and I keep running across 'natch'. Is it short for 'naturally'? Websters says it has something to do with meat, so that's not it. Google couldn't help, either.



Help me, oh hip ones!

[Zach @ Jan 13th 2006 10:23AM]

natch means naturally.

[Raptor @ Jan 13th 2006 10:43AM]

The issue's really a matter of what "giga-" means.



For a hard drive as it comes from the manufacturer, it means 10^9. For an OS, it means 2^30.



So a 40GB iPod uses a 40GB hard drive, which only has 40 billion bytes on it. Divide that by 2^30, and you get slightly more than 37.25, which is the binary gigabyte count. Considering that filesystem boundaries are determined by binary chunks (clusters/blocks ranging from 1024 bytes to 65536 bytes,) the functional capacity really should be measured in terms of binary arithmetic anyway.



Essentially, your new hard drive only has about 93% of its advertised capacity. That number does drop a bit due to filesystem overhead, especially when you have to account for journaling and assorted metadata.

[mpeng @ Jan 14th 2006 2:28AM]

props to posting a hackaday article!

[chi4julia @ Jan 14th 2006 5:06AM]

If it really works and even if it costs to be more than the 'video' pods - it'll still be worthed.



I want flash chip based player.



Did someone figure out how to enable Nano to become direct storage -for d-cams and stuff- yet?

[Craigy @ Jan 15th 2006 3:48AM]

Last time I ate flash chips my tummy hurt :(

[jack herron @ Jan 18th 2006 7:05PM]

I think this is a bunch of bullshit. I would just stick with the 4gig nano.That has enough memory to hold more than enough music.

jack

[jack herron @ Jan 18th 2006 7:06PM]

I think this is a bunch of bullshit. I would just stick with the 4gig nano.That has enough memory to hold more than enough music.

jack

[Dave @ Mar 26th 2006 10:45AM]

Ok,

It sounds like this idea is possible, however whats the point exactly. From my understanding (no one brought it up) the nano has a limited database for up to 1000 songs (for the 4gb). So the nano will only show the 1st 1000 songs...are they also updating the software to support the more songs in the database? Also, what exactly is the actually user compacity of a 4gb nano...someone mentioned about 3.7gb of actual user space...I can't seem to find that 1 out. Anyways, just some more food for thought

[john adeoye @ Mar 29th 2006 5:41PM]

i am a comment spammer: [e-mail]

[Anthony @ Apr 4th 2006 12:58PM]

im guessing it works, and apple must of got wind of it becuase i have a 4 gig nano that broke, and uhhh they changed it. now it uses a daughter board that is 2- 2 gig chips. and that daugher board is connected in place of the original 4 gig chip. and the "open space" has a spot for a screw now...so if you wanted to mod it..youd have to grind that down and cut the connector (for the daughterboard) down flat...and then you could do it? maybe...

[BJ @ Apr 16th 2006 5:34PM]

I want my bandwidth back. All of it. NOW lol

[Ben Amodeo @ Sep 26th 2006 2:26PM]

sorry i didnt say anything about this before but there IS a catch to having a 6gb, 8gb, 10gb, or 12gb nano..your battery dies faster..and while making it you risk destruction of your ipod..

-Ben

P.S
also the back logo where it says what size memory you have will be wrong..haha

[K @ Nov 29th 2006 4:41AM]

The chips on the photos are 32Gb Samsung Nand Flash, not 4Gb.

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[Jason @ Oct 17th 2007 5:07AM]

Wow this entire thread is filled with the stupidity that ruins the internet.

Obviously the ones discrediting these claims are the ones that lack the intelligence or creativity to understand such a concept.

4gb nanos used a couple different revision mainbaord setups including the original 2gb type with two CS (chip select) lines and two tssop locations, the other used a daughterboard and the connector could be removed and the chips located just like the latter version.

The samsung chips are a "stacked package" from the factory. No one is piggybacking chips.....

2x2=4 All the poor minds who are bashing the concept need to go back to math class.