and they said the hard drive was fried and there was nothing they could do since I didn't buy it from them.

Personally, I would be happy with an Ipod that could host 500GB - 1000GB, but realistically speaking this may not be possible for a while, considering Apple is insistent on using flash-based drives rather than hard-drives

After 3 years of constant use the hard drive in my 80Gb Classic finally died.

Without its sizable hard drive, this would not be possible

If all you want is an expensive portable hard drive with a video screen, this is definitely the unit for you.

They don't even make iPods a hard drive half this size anymore

(Mine has taken two falls from my desk onto our hardwood floor while the hard drive was copying data, and the iPod survived both falls just fine.)The hard drive isn't as fast as the flash memory in the nano and touch, but in everyday use, the slower read speeds are not an issue.

Once ITunes was loaded my sister connected her IPOD and proceeded to sync her IPOD with my laptop, dumping some 5 gig worth of music onto my hard drive.

You'll mainly notice that it takes the Cover Flow view a second to replace the placeholder graphics with the proper cover art as the hard drive tries to catch up while you scroll through your album covers.

If I need storage, I can just buy an external hard drive with 500 GB for $80 at tiger direct

Elegant interface, great sound, fun extras of varying usefulness (just try to watch a movie on that little screen or to play a game with a click wheel; however, I find it nice to have my Windows contacts and my photos on the device), decent battery life, hard drive that stores a vast amount of music, no trouble (in my case anyway) interfacing with my computer.

Also love the large hard drive on this one too

Apple's iPod Classic is an excellent choice for anyone who wants a portable hard drive/MP3/video player

There seems to be a general lag the unit experiences that isn't entirely noticeable and is somewhat forgiveable since it's running off of a hard drive and not solid-state memory, but it can detract from the experience at times when the unit pauses to load an album cover or move on to the selected section

every since i received it,the 120 gig hard drive is all it is said to

Is it because it's hard-drive based

Sometimes it is sluggish to navigate compared to the touch, but that's to be expected from its large hard drive instead of a flash drive

Ability to use the device for data storage might please some, though it seems to me that it makes more sense to use a thumb drive or external hard drive for that

After looking further, I found out it was in hard drive failure

The only problem I see is that it has an actual hard drive inside it, so if you drop it...well...too bad

Apple's iPod Classic is an excellent choice for anyone who wants a portable hard drive/MP3/video player

The hard drive is just starting to give out after about 2 years of grueling work.

Of course, it is hard-drive based, not flash memory based, and all hard drives will eventually crash.

Also love the large hard drive on this one too

The iPod classic doesn't have the beautiful glass screen of the iPod touch, and it's much more bulky than the sleek little iPod nano, but it holds a lot more data on its internal hard drive, and the screen size (2.5" at 320x240 pixels) is an agreeable compromise between the "squint-o-vision" stamp-sized screen of the nano, and the incredible 3.5" widescreen on the touch

I have yet to come close to filling 120 GB, but I have an external hard drive still full of music to integrate into my system.

The huge hard drive allows us to store all of our music and not have to select what not to put on it like we had to with our old 30gb video ipod.

I constantly push this to do more, and it always does better than before, even if a minor error occurs, like CD cover loss, occurs, but usually, so long as I have a local hard drive backup, I can take care if it; its just like any PC, or high capacity unit

If all you want is an expensive portable hard drive with a video screen, this is definitely the unit for you.

On the plus side, the hard drive has much faster write speeds than flash memory, which makes the sync process with iTunes faster

Hey, I even use it as a external hard drive

and it doesnt take too long to sync, even at one song at a time) although it was to be expected that at a higher hard drive, these do occur

I'm going to get a hard drive upgrade in my 5th generation (30->80) and stay with a true classic until Apple makes an ~80 gigabyte Touch, since clearly they don't give a ---- about their scroll wheel players anymore.

I would look into Square Trade for a warranty for the iPod though since this is a hard-drive that can fail

Hard Drive crashed within 6 months

I also have pictures and use it as a portable hard drive

I also have pictures and use it as a portable hard drive

the one I purchased had a bad hard drive

I've been considering buying an MP3 player for a while and the range of functionality of the Ipod attracted my attention every time - as well as the large hard drive

since it was only $50 more than the 16GB Nano that it was sitting across from, and I was already used to having an actual hard drive in my media player, I thought I would check it out

Lastly, you can use the iPod classic as an external USB hard drive for backups and data transfer, which is a bit pointless with the nano (because of its low capacity), and not possible at all with the touch

No matter, 120GB is still a lot of memory and even after several years my 250GB computer hard drive is well under a quarter full, so I decided to go ahead

Platter-based conventional hard drive inside means slow read times.

The classic is the only iPod with a hard drive, which means that it's a bit more fragile than the flash-based nano and touch, but it also means that it has vastly more storage space.

I took it to an iphone/ipod repair agent who ran some diagnostics on it, he said the hard drive is shot, it had over 4000 reallocs (whatever that means

No matter, 120GB is still a lot of memory and even after several years my 250GB computer hard drive is well under a quarter full, so I decided to go ahead

Lastly, you can use the iPod classic as an external USB hard drive for backups and data transfer, which is a bit pointless with the nano (because of its low capacity), and not possible at all with the touch

It's a great product but beware if you,like me, use the shuffle funtion while driving

this is the big daddy of ipods, with it's 120gb of hard drive space, it will hold everything you have and then some, it is heavier than some because of it's hard drive, and you can feel the hd in motion, but it is not that big for what you get.

Hard Drive crashed within 6 months

This is my fifth or sixth iPod (I forget), starting with the original 5GB first-gen, then a 10GB second-gen which was a warranty replacement for the 1G, then a 4th-gen 40GB which died (these had flaky Toshiba drives in them), a 5.5-gen video 60GB that was stolen a few months ago, and an iPhone which is a great phone but a lousy iPod, chiefly because it is dangerous to try and change songs while driving, and the GSM signal squawking and honking through the headphone jack became old