IPod hard drive crashing problems

Question

Sorry this is going to be long, as I want to give some background, because I would love to hear opinions about this:
I had a 6th generation 160g iPod for just over 3 years. I was on vacation using it over a long weekend a week ago. I was listening to music and decided I was going to watch a Simpsons episode that I bought from the iTunes store and was in my "tv shows" section of my iPod.
As I went to switch to the episode, the iPod froze black. I had been having issues with it randomly resetting itself or pausing during songs, so I thought it might be on its way out. - Sure enough when I did the reset it never booted back up. I tried several times. So when I got back home 2 days later and plugged it into my computer, I was not surprised that it still would not reboot.
I was bummed. 3 years is not a long time when you spend that much money. I am broke right now and since I am a music fanatic, with a huge music library I was wondering how I was going to carry on. I cannot afford to buy a new iPod.
My dear father came to my rescue and showed up at my house with a brand new 7th generation 160g iPod on Saturday evening, just as a nice jesture. - I let it sync up, went to bed. Sunday afternoon, I was taking my daughter to the park and I brought my iPod into the car. I noticed that much of the artwork was not popping up as I looked through both coverflow and sampled some songs in playlists. And when I went to try a video again... BAM, the iPod locked up and wouldn't reset, just like the old one.
I thought... maybe this is a fluke, but how strange that a brand new iPod would crash again on legally purchased iTunes video. So after trying to get it to reset, I plugged it in and again, it would not reset and my computer would not recognize it. The hard-drive just wouldn't boot up.
Then I thought... even though it wasn't plugged into my computer either time and I had used the old one for a while without syncing, maybe it was something on my computer... so I plugged it into my wife's laptop and it said "found new hardware" and then there was a new message saying something along the lines of "there is a problem with your new hardware and it cannot be installed".
My dad had gotten the 2 year warranty, but since it wasn't even 24 hours, I went to Best Buy and brought them back the iPod. They checked it out and said "wow, it's rare that out of the box it would crash, but it's crashed" and they gave me a new one. - I asked them about the possibility of something corrupting it, but they said it was unlikely and they since it's a hard-drive, hard-drives crash.
So on Sunday evening, I did the same routine, I synced my iPod. This time, I tried a little bit of music and a little bit of video without syncing my library and it worked... Then that night I let the whole thing sync.
This morning (Monday) I took it to work and played some music while I dropped my daughter off, and all of a sudden all the artwork is gone again... I figured I deal with that later, because although it bothered me, at least it was playing song after song with no issue.
I'm at work now and I was letting a playlist play on shuffle. It was working just find and was so happy to have an iPod back.
Then I hit the menu button and it takes me back to "coverflow" (the last place I was browsing) and all of a sudden the sound starts buzzing and the whole thing locks up. It's stuck, so I go to reset it...
And low & behold, it won't reset, like the hard-drive crashed AGAIN. This is the 3rd iPod in a row. I plugged it into my work computer, just to see if it would recognize it. (I downloaded the latest iTunes on there) It won't. Again it just won't reboot.
Now the first one, I was having hard-drive troubles, and hadn't been synced in a while, so unfortunately I think the product just doesn't last very long.
But now with 2 new ones, it's making me think that there could be a problem with something in my computer. But I can't imagine what. Everything is either ripped directly into iTunes from a CD, bought from the iTunes store or were WAV files I put into iTunes and converted to aac files. I am a musicians and don't believe in illegally downloading music and don't use torrents. I can't imagine what could corrupt anything I'm syncing.
I have about 110g of music that I am trying to sync. And then some tv shows, which I don't always sync all of them. Most of them were purchased from iTunes, but I have a few that I took from DVD and converted and put into my iTunes.
I have called the apple help line, but they want me to call them back when I'm at my computer at home and we can trouble shoot, even though I know they won't be able to help me, because my iPod won't be able to be read.
I would love to get some opinions and help.
Thank you,
Paul.

Answer 1

Okay, by looking at my previous posting in this forum, it has apparently only been 2 1/2 years since I got my last iPod.