iPod Nano 3G 16GB Storage Upgrade - Dev Vlog Pt. 1

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iPod Nano Modding Discord: discord.gg/bah8hgkTQs
My Twitch: www.twitch.tv/tuckerosman
Over the past year, I've been working on upgrading the iPod Nano 3G's NAND flash chip to 16GB. I am not yet successful, but I've made some exciting progress in iPod software modding techniques. After a series of small software patches to the iPod's bootloader, I've confirmed that I'm able to read the NAND chip's ID. This video glosses over a year's worth of work. If you want to know more, join the Discord or catch a live stream over on Twitch. I love answering questions and even more I love it when people give me their knowledge about this seemingly very niche but also very common facet of embedded electronics design.
0:00 - Introduction
2:04 - Where's the Disk?
2:56 - Wherein Wesley Attempts a Chip Swap
4:48 - It Isn't Working
5:44 - Wherein Wesley Attempts a Chip Swap But Succeeds This Time
7:39 - Trying to Explain The Firmware in July
11:29 - Summarizing The Last Year and Next Steps
***
Shot & Edited by Tucker
Soldering by Wesley
Suffering also by Tucker
Tim Apple isn't a real person, fortunately.

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Опубликовано:

23 апр 2021

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Комментарии : 114

@SlushiiMusic 3 года назад

I need a 128 gb nano 😞

@ihari3321 2 года назад

But only classic's can have 128gb.

@kilreejohn 2 года назад

@@ihari3321 Minis too

@ihari3321 2 года назад

@@kilreejohn yeah, mini and classics are little thicker than the nano, the nano Is so thin we can't add higher capacity storage..

@OnTheEdgex23 7 месяцев назад

I’d be happy with a 32GB 2G nano.

@starryJulyNIghtSky Год назад

This mate needs more recognition and support- well done you're very talented!

@cheeseconsumer3951 3 года назад

I recently bought 2 broken iPod nano 3G in the hopes of restoring them and increasing the storage, just thought to myself that there's nothing a micro SD card can't do. However was surprised that it isn't as simple as it seemed. Please make this happen, it will help everyone in this situation. Good luck with the project!

@TuckerOsman 3 года назад

Thank you! The quest continues - feel free to join the Discord server if you haven't already.

@PiPArtemis 3 года назад

I recently decided to start a small collection of each ipod nano generation with the side goal of collecting enough broken/for parts units that I can do such a mod to a 1st gen or 5th gen as those are my favorites Completely inexperienced to disassembling iPods, let alone soldering but it seems super fun and broken electronics are cheap enough that it's a pretty reasonable hobby

@peteasmr2952 3 года назад

This is my favourite iPod released. I never managed to get one when it came out but have since bought a blue one on eBay in good condition.

@grumps5940 2 года назад

Cool, I got a iPod Nano 3G 8GB from a yard sale for $2. First thing I did was check if I could put Rockbox on it.. but nope. Can't wait for Part 2.

@maciller8461 3 года назад

Bro please continue to make videos you are genuinely a funny guy and the editing is amazing

@duartefilipepereiraneves6933 3 года назад

"user-replaceable HDD" dankpods destroying a 7th gen trying to get it opened

@cooleve 2 года назад

Great, I'm about to write an iPod emulator. this video let me learn more about iPod hardware

@TuckerOsman 2 года назад

Join the discord too - lots of good information and knowledgeable people!

@gingerhogan4899 5 месяцев назад

YOU ARE UNBELIEVABLE ! LOL. I just found my first I Pod, and my friend asked me GB? WTH his is 256GB and mine is never going to change, because it has GREAT Euro Dance Music on it! I watched you video, just for fun, and decided I would rather fork over 5 big ones if I ever needed a bigger I Pod! But I Learned a lot from you, relating to Apple, Forward Progress, Marketing, Inquisitive thinking, and believe it or not, your video inspired me to put a new hard drive into an old Mac Book Pro, that wouldn't download APPS anymore, and it worked! Your outright curiosity is AMAZING, HYSTERICAL, ELECTRICAL, and ENLIGHTENING, aside from the subject! Keep it up, you got it, love it!

@wwlaurenww 3 года назад

This is so, so enjoyable. I am a sucker for hacking technology and soldering. Don't get Chuck Kiefer'd.

@TuckerOsman 3 года назад

I'm not worried. it's Apple, not lemons.

@wilkgr 3 года назад

I had a quick look on Google, but couldn't find anything. Who is Chuck Kiefer, and what happened?

@wwlaurenww 3 года назад

@@wilkgr Watch 'The Perfect Lemonade' (also on this channel). It's a reference to that

@wilkgr 3 года назад

@@wwlaurenww Ah cheers!

@jamesdunstan4927 3 года назад

I have been trying this on and off myself over the past year or so. I have tried it on the nano 2nd gen, touch 4th gen and i just had another go on a nano 1st gen before watching this. This is just soldering on new nand chips though, i haven't tried anything with the firmware yet. Windows is able to see the ipod as a removable disk although there is no storage size and will give an error when you try to reformat. iTunes will detect the ipod and allow you to reset it although it will reboot into the 'no hard drive' screen. I have found these tsop-48 sockets on aliexpress which i am going to try and solder onto the board and just try inserting a bunch of different chips to see if any work on the nano 2nd gen. Just got to wait for them to arrive. Just joined the discord.

@TuckerOsman 3 года назад

Nice! I just got my hands on a TSOP-48 socket myself. Like I said in the video I was going to do some hardware level debugging - and I probably will still have to - but I made a small breakthrough in understanding the firmware which I posted to the Discord. Welcome to the world of fun! 😅

@Spazza42 2 года назад

@@TuckerOsman Whilst the comment is from awhile ago, would these NAND chips not need re-flashing in order to work or be recognised by the iPod itself? The curious question would be what readable limit Apple may have integrated on the logic board? 4GB seems small even back then, seeing how the 1st gen Nano is basically just a scaled down 5th gen makes me feel they may have used the same limit? Or would they have created it from the ground up and capped it at 4GB? The 5th gen classics are popular to mod but they have a hard readable limit of 128GB. I wonder if the nano has a similar ceiling?

@TuckerOsman 2 года назад

@@Spazza42 There seems to be logic in the EFI bootloader that allows it to reformat a completely blank flash chip. It would make sense for them to do this, since the underlying NAND structures are software defined and somewhat dynamic. Each iPod can format itself and skip the factory flash step. The 1st gen Nano has an ATA-to-NAND bridge chip - likely since the CPU itself doesn't have a NAND interface - so the limitation might exist there. Some people in my discord long ago were looking into this. The Nano 3rd Gen is a scaled down iPod Classic for the most part. Since the NAND structures are dynamically generated, it stands to reason that it can format NAND of any geometry. In practice this might not be true - at this juncture I don't believe I'm running into this formatting issue specifically, rather the iPod is incapable of writing to the chip for some reason. Either it's addressing it incorrectly, or the chip is rejecting the write requests.

@trackerrrr 3 года назад

When the robot overlords take over and need parts, Tucker's hoarding will come in handy...

@OnTheEdgex23 7 месяцев назад

The first and second gen nanos do have a fully functional rock box port, wouldn’t those be an easier starting point?

@jimellis5604 2 года назад

When will part 2 come?

@Roninkinx 2 года назад

Duuude no get the battery out of there before you solder it! IT could explode.. But updates? I'd love to hear more xD

@davidgator2279 5 месяцев назад

Great job on the video! Highly enjoyed it.

@Mareka6969 24 дня назад

Greetings from sep, 24. This video made me smile.

@damian9303 Год назад

Y’know things are gonna get interesting when the Vsauce theme plays

@aarron1234567 3 года назад

The sound quality on pretty much any iPod is better than pretty much any iPhone currently out including the 12 promax due to the way that wired headphones are handled on the platform it restricts the voltage to whatever the Lightning bolt bus is capable of the iPod classics have a way better dec then what current iPhones have not to mention they can get way louder and don’t lose a lot of the quality through the Bluetooth standard not saying Bluetooth headphones aren’t great but in the audio world you’re always trading quality for convenience Bluetooth can’t deliver lossless audio it exceeds the bandwith limitations of the platform your friend the audio engineer

@dylanmccallister1888 2 года назад

iPod can't play 24 bit audio through the dac without bumping it down to 16bit The only way iPod can play 24 bit audio is by docking it and using a dac from an external sound system that is capable of it. This is why it crashes or skips a lot when trying to play lossless 24 bit through the jack it is trying to convert it to 16 in real time. Just because the iPod can download 24 48 doesn't mean it can play it through your headphones, it can't. Even if it doesn't skip for you, that's 16 bit audio coming out.

@gadgetmadlad6691 2 года назад

Have you tried stacking the upgraded memory on top of the existing memory so it's still receiving the relevant signals and code?

@shawndasilva 2 года назад

The same thing that was done for ram increases for certain models of the original Xbox! Good idea!

@shawndasilva 2 года назад

The same thing that was done for ram increases for certain models of the original Xbox! Good idea!

@us3r_d0e5nt_3x1st 2 года назад

Hi, maybe you can try to increase storage in iPod Nano 2g? On this iPod you can install Rockbox easly, so it will be easier.

@KoopaMedia64 Месяц назад

I'm no solder wizard either, but I do know the correct way to do this was to take the Nano PCB out of the case, wrap the whole board in Kapton tape, hot air rework the flash chip off then put the new chip on.

@johnmurcott1273 3 года назад

We need an old ipod engineer from apple

@TuckerOsman 3 года назад

My DMs are wiiiiiiiiiiide open for an Apple or Samsung engineer.

@wcvp 3 года назад

The real question is, how much more unpublished video do you have of me saying/doing stupid shit?

@TuckerOsman 3 года назад

many gigaboodles. content for days. why do you think I bring my camera when I go north?

@VV-hd7jy 2 года назад

When is part 2 coming? Almost a year

@TuckerOsman 2 года назад

🤔🤔🤔

@EvertvanIngen Год назад

It's been a year. I'm curious how it's going now

@TuckerOsman Год назад

My focus in the last year has mainly been on the Nano Bluetooth project, but since that's completed I have come crawling back to this project. Since this video, I've made a couple of small breakthroughs: - the M1FMISS layer's bytecode is about 80% figured out - the iPod can, indeed, read from the new NAND but it can't write to it. I have some ideas as to why this might be but it's hard to actually test them - I dumped a stock iPod's NAND so I can study the structures like the BBT and see how those special pages are written because they're required for the iPod's "VFL Production Format" If you want more regular updates, feel free to join the Discord which is decently active with iPod Nano hacking!

@epiciphones 2 года назад

video i need i just bought 88 ipods and learning soldering 🥳

@ledhunters 2 года назад

Maannn, I wanted to try this (replacing NAND) on iPod nano 3rd gen. (my favorite) since 2020, I even bought new 32GB NAND chips and several nano's to practice on. I also noticed that 8GB models have 2 NAND chips stacked one on top of another (someone mentioned this in comments). I was hoping just replacing the chip will work but now.... i am sad :( Going to go not to discord and see whats new. Please, keep on going with this.

@TuckerOsman 2 года назад

I've recently been waylaid by other projects, but I do revisit this occasionally. TL;DR: I think it's an ECC issue... maybe? Quite unclear, but I still have not given up on it!

@ledhunters 2 года назад

@@TuckerOsman Btw, I now (cooking for several months) have another idea, I have several 7th gen nanos, they also use NAND but different packaging (no legs), iPhone 6/(6s - confirmed)/7/7+/8 and 8+ use the same NAND chips format as well as iPad 5th gen. Price for broken 5th gen iPad is like 6-10$ (there is a bunch of icloud locked on local e-market) and I am going to get one of those just need to find 128GB version, I could get 64GB but while we are at it why not go all the way :D so I am going ot try and swop the NAND :) (I have good soldering skils)

@Okks_0 7 месяцев назад

@@ledhuntersyou did it?

@Zombytes 8 месяцев назад

Can you flash the ID of the actual nand chip to one of the IDs thats already on the ipod? It might not show the correct amount of gigs on the ipod, but maybe it would still let you use the full memory amount? Idk just throwing out an idea ha. Or maybe a nand flasher, and copy the data off one of the chips that you pull of the pod, to your new bigger chip?

@bondr006 Месяц назад

I love the sound from my iPod Nano 3rd gen.

@outfield1988 6 месяцев назад

Low melt solder works great as well to help de solder.

@kdesign101 6 месяцев назад

Hey Tucker. Good job sir o7 Have you successfully gotten a new Ssd to work by cloning the old ssd? If so maybe the solution is to make a card-swapper-plug and going old school with “mixtapes” in the form of ssd’s 😅

@TuckerOsman 6 месяцев назад

The geometry of the new NAND is different, so it has to be formatted differently. The iPod knows how to format it, provided you tell it what that geometry is. So, in theory, you could swap chips with the same chip, clone it, and expect it to work, but not if the chip has a different layout (page size, page count, etc.)

@chsrgN 4 месяца назад

Very entertaining vid

@valerialevenets8427 11 месяцев назад

Do you think its possible to upgrade memory on iPod nano 7G ?

@kimjongoof5000 Год назад

Would it be possible to upgrade a G5 nano to 128 by soldering on an SSD?

@TuckerOsman Год назад

No, you'd need a bare NAND chip of that size to replace the chip that's originally installed (SSD signalling is often over SATA or PCIe, the iPod speaks to NAND directly). And then you'd run into the same problems I've been having making this work: making the software accept it.

@BavarianM 3 года назад

Thinking of doing this to a really cool Sonu Walkman MP3 player But they came with 512mb and 1gb I wanted to make it at least 8gb I've been reading a lot of I can just swap out the Nand or if I need to program it

@TuckerOsman 3 года назад

Given my experience with the iPod, I believe you'll have to at the very least configure the NAND detection so the firmware knows the size of the chip. but ymmv, I know nothing about the MP3 Walkman.

@TuckerOsman 3 года назад

Actually, Rockbox seems to already support some models. www.rockbox.org/wiki/SonyNW

@Pacificbell 9 месяцев назад

i want to do this to my ipod touch 6th gen becuase it has 16 gigs it can barely hold the ios verson it runs cant hold more then 10 apps and i dont wanna spend money on a ipod with more storage

@cyngen05 3 года назад

Great vid. Can you make a video on fixing an iPod nano 3rd gen white screen please.

@TuckerOsman 3 года назад

no need for a whole video - white screen generally means you need to replace the screen. I imagine there are already plenty of videos that cover this, but when I get a white screen that usually means the screen ribbon is messed up somehow and the only way to fix that is to replace the screen. or maybe the ribbon is plugged in slightly crooked. either way you have to take the iPod apart to fix it. I recommend also getting a new back for your iPod since getting into the n3g will almost certainly cause irreparable damage to the back that's currently on there.

@Kilill_kak_Kirill Год назад

Greetings from Russia!! You are the best, thank you!!

@boop53 6 месяцев назад

if these could be easily modded it would be my fave ipod ever

@coolduder1001 2 года назад

I want to do it with a first gen nano, can you access the chip in linux and use it as a flash drive?

@TuckerOsman 2 года назад

There's someone on my discord server trying to do this with the n1g - it's a little weird in that it has a an ATA-to-NAND bridge. But assuming the iPod can read the NAND chip, Linux should be able to use it as a mass storage device when the iPod is in disk mode.

@outfield1988 6 месяцев назад

You remind me of John Belushi and that’s cool.

@pauloumali6242 2 года назад

Is it possible that its same process when upgrading nand chips on iphones is same to nano? Try reading the old chip, then transfer it to the new

@TuckerOsman 2 года назад

maybe, but the data structures would have to be extended across the entire chip, and the iPod still wouldn't know about how to deal with the new chip's geometry. there is a function in the EFI bootloader that reformats bad flash if the data structures are corrupt or not present, but the first step is getting the lowest level of the software stack to actually be able to write to the chip.

@pauloumali6242 2 года назад

@@TuckerOsman is it possible after upgrading nano nand, use Rockbox software? i dont have nano, i cant verify it.

@TuckerOsman 2 года назад

@@pauloumali6242 there is currently no rockbox port for the n3g, but this NAND research is definitely a step in the right direction.

@SamDaNerfer 3 месяца назад

10:05 you will meet the same fate my brother also you might wanna make a weekly newletter

@marihernandez5844 3 года назад

Hello I noticed that on an earlier ipod nano apple actually wired two nand chips in parallel one stacked on top of the other . so for the 4 gb Ipod instead of one 4gb chip they uses two 2gb stacked on eachother. So would it be possible to get two 8gb chips to get 16gb??

@TuckerOsman 3 года назад

Yeah this happens in some configurations of the n3g and the thought has occured to me. The n3g firmware supports 8 banks so while this is theoretically possible, I'm not sure which NAND chips will support this many CE lines and how to clip the chip legs. But it might be a tad easier to bend the software to your will in that case.

@marihernandez5844 3 года назад

@@TuckerOsman I see, well good luck then I really hope you are successful. 😁

@ZeginMakesMusic Год назад

What you can probably do is reduce the form factor of the fifth gen Ipod, then put an SD card in it.

@dianapocalypse Год назад

I would love to see someone try this!

@Musicmaddnes 3 года назад

I think the issue is the format of the band chip. Try it on a Mac and format to Mac instead of fat.

@高骏祺 Год назад

Is there any chance I can upgrade nano 7th's memory?

@TuckerOsman Год назад

Not yet, unfortunately

@高骏祺 Год назад

@@TuckerOsman 16 GB can't fit the video nowadays😭

@cju182 3 года назад

Thanks for your vid! I'm also interessted in a nano SSD upgrade. Must be anyhow possible... maybe if one of the apple devs finds this thread

@kodyman40 3 года назад

Why not get a 5th to 7th gen ipod, copy all the codes off of the flash chips and apply them to the chips on the nano. They have tools that read the data off of those chips. A bios tool might work too

@TuckerOsman 3 года назад

I assume you mean copy the binaries from a iPod Classic and apply them to an iPod Nano? That might possibly work for the operating system itself (maybe, it's a stretch, but maybe), but the rest of the software seems to be built for the specific device it's running on - despite being the same processor i.e. the n3g firmware lacks support for ATA disks and Classic firmware lacks support for NAND flash.

@Pablo4949 3 года назад

poor fella just wants 16 GB of S K A D R E A M

@TuckerOsman 3 года назад

WE'RE NOT GONNA LET (the limitations of the iPod firmware) WIN!!!!!!

@XErox7X 7 месяцев назад

Any progress?

@TuckerOsman 7 месяцев назад

Yes, there has been progress since this video. Nothing usable yet - I've been debating whether or not to make a follow up video until I hit a big milestone. But there has, indeed, been progress.

@cemsengul16 Год назад

Imagine a 1 TB iPod Nano 3rd gen?

@outfield1988 6 месяцев назад

Love that nano but impossible to work on.

@toasterifclj9974 Год назад

Ok hypothetical what If instead of replacing the band you just put another nand on top of it then restored it recognizes the one nand and just uses the storage on the next

@diegooliveira1083 6 месяцев назад

I need a new charging port for this ipod, ultra hard to find

@Therealkrsone 11 месяцев назад

Where is the next part?

@TuckerOsman 11 месяцев назад

Soon, hopefully. I am semi-actively still working on it!

@victorfabio5108 2 года назад

I'd like to see an sd card in an ipod nano 6g or 7g

@averydee5328 3 года назад

4:30 you're supposed to install the nano 3G operating system on it after replacing the storage

@TuckerOsman 3 года назад

There must be a working NAND driver loaded to interface with the storage before an operating system can be written to it. Without patching the driver in the EFI partition, it's not possible to format the chip or, further, read/write data to it.