I’d been wanting to a project like this for a while and I noticed a distinct lack of guides for this project. I thought it would be fun to document my upgrade process here, hopefully it helps other users looking to do this modification.

For Context, these are the parts we will be replacing. The older iPods were released before flash storage was cheap in substantial sizes and as such they all still contained spinning disk hard drives. Thanks to the wonders of technology we now have SD cards that contain four times as much storage while still remaining a twentieth of the size. This will allows us to save space, weight and power while still leaving room for a larger battery.

I did a project similar to this back in 2017 on an iPod Mini. The size is pretty ideal, but it still uses the classic monochrome LCD and the colossal 32 MB of ram means you can realistically only utilize 128 GB of flash storage. The 60 GB iPod Video contains 64 MB of RAM and will allow the iTunes database to utilize up to 256 GB of flash storage. This is a common issue that can be circumvented by Rockbox, but custom operating systems carry their own issues.

Everything We’ll be Using



3000 mAh Battery

iFlash Adapter

256 GB SD Card



iPod Video Front

iPod Video Back

As stated above, we’ll be replacing the storage and the battery. The original hard drive uses a ZIF connector. Some sort of adapter will be required. There are a number of ZIF to CF adapters which allows for the insertion of an SD card. The downside to this method is that finding a compatible adapter can be hit or miss. the iFlash Solo is available at iflash.xyz and is an adapter specifically designed for our purposes, granted at a higher price.

Important note, if you’re following along at home I recommend formatting your SD card in FAT32. There are a number of ways to do this but if you have a Windows machine cleaning the disk with disk utility through CMD is a commonly used method. I can’t speak for macOS but I’d imagine disk utility would be similarly effective.

Our new battery allegedly contains 3000 mAh. There are a number of these floating around eBay so I would imagine that 3000 mAh number is exaggerated. Regardless, this is a large upgrade over the 850 mAh stock battery that we will be replacing. the larger battery combined with lower power consumption SD card should grant a significant increase in battery life.

Cracking Open the Case

The iPod itself can feel a little daunting to open given the lack of screws. There are ten latches you have to unhook and this can be done with any tool that can reach down and pry up without damaging the internals.

Most guides will recommend a metal pry tool as seen below but the blue plastic pry tool worked fine for me and are commonly found in teardown kits available online. This step in the process can be done in a variety of ways and I highly recommend watching a video if you feel unsure.

You will want to push the tool in between the face of the device and the backplate with the pointed end pointing outward. One you pry the tool into the device you will then want to pry out allowing the metal case to unhook from the front. Repeat this process going around the device until all ten hooks are free and the two pieces come apart.

Before separating the two sides, the battery cable and headphone jack cable must be unhooked. The headphone cable lies directly below the LCD and is a standard ZIF cable but the battery cable must be unhooked by lifting up the hinge on the side closest to the case. I may update this post with more detailed pictures in the future but I recommend a video for this step as well. Once you successfully complete this step you should be left with two pieces

Removing the battery is relatively simple as it was only held in by light adhesive and essentially slides out of place. Replacing the battery required some rearranging of the case. I recommend unscrewing the two screws keeping the DAC and headphone jack attached and moving them aside to reveal the piece of supporting foam glued to the case

The nature of the new battery is that it spans nearly the entire length of the case so it will be replacing the foam as support. A razor blade worked best for removal and left very little residue behind upon removal. After you’ve removed said black foam, simply reattach the headphone jack and slide the battery under jack, replacing the support.

Moving to the other side of the iPod, attaching the iFlash board was relatively simple. slide the board into the ZIF connector with the side with text facing up. Once the ZIF connectors is fully inserted into the connector push down the connector. Attach a single piece of foam above the sd card to pad the adapter. Both parts will look like this:

At this point, once you reconnect both the headphone jack and battery cable, the iPod should properly boot up and prompt you to connect it to iTunes where you will be prompted to reset the iPod. I personally ran into an issue where iTunes refused to reset the iPod and after testing the SD card and attempting to reset through disk mode I concluded the issue was the HDD cable. After ordering a replacement through a vendor on eBay, everything ran smoothly. If you run into issues after reassembling, troubleshoot every part and get replacements as necessary.

In the future, I plan on installing a third party operating system like Rockbox, but for now, the stock OS functions fine. The lack of an HDD does mean that the device is noticeably lighter and should reduce power consumption.

I recently upgraded to a new phone without a headphone jack so I’ll get a reasonable amount of use out of this device. As more phones lose the headphone jack and Bluetooth becomes more common (and affordable), I’d imagine carrying around a second device for music will become less attractive. Until then, it remains a complicated way to save battery life and data on your smartphone.

I hope this post proved helpful to anyone looking to do this modification themselves and at the very least entertaining to others. I will upgrade this post with more detailed pictures if I get the chance in order to provide better step by step instructions.