3g iPod battery life and hard drive head...

Hi all!
I have a 3G 20GB iPod, and sometimes the battery drains itself out even with a brand new battery and the iPod being shut off.
I can barely get 4-5 hours of playing time, no backlight, equaliser, and no songs skipping.
I found out that you can hear the head of the hard disk moving even when the iPod is turned off. One of my relative has a 3G 15GB iPod and she's experiencing the exact same problem of battery life, and her iPod's hard drive make's the exact same noise. And she also has a brand new battery.
So can you listen to your iPod, (even between times when the iPod has stored the data to it's RAM the head of the hard drive is still making some kind of movement) and tell me what you think.
I've tried to install all previous versions of iPod software to no avail.
For now I have completely erased the drive with "zero all" along with a surface test by Tech Tool Pro, and it seems to have made a difference.
Time will tell, post your observations and I will keep you posted.
QuickSilver 933   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

MrSpike wrote:
The largest detractors for battery life are the obvious ones like backlight usage, anything that makes the HDD seek (FFW, skip track, etc...) using EQ, and volume. There are many other areas but most are pretty minor. Alot of it actually depends on the chip that regulates energy to the player. Supposedly we will be seeing new chips that double or triple battery life on these mp3 players in the near future but we shall see.
Hard disk is by far the biggest user, backlight uses some (but you wouldn't have the backlight on, and it's not good for the life of the EL panel either). EQ seems to have issues on some players where it uses far too much power in my opinion, specifically the Smart Volume function. I hope Creative can address the power demands of this if possible. Creative managed to double the base battery life of the Touch with the changes they made in some of the hardware, so greater li'ves are definitely achievable.
Rich_T: I've used your excellent test data as the start of a battery curve graph I'm putting together. I'm taking Creative's benchmark data and anything else I see to try and create curves for the players under different circumstances. I think once we have a base curve for one circumstance we can probably extrapolate it to all the other players, at least as a guess.
If anyone at Creative has any battery life figures for different scenarios (which I would be amazed if they didn't) it would be very useful

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