Major Stopping/Skipping Problem With 30G Photo iPod

Question

Hi all. I'll try to give the short version of my major iPod problems I've been having. It's been going on for a couple months straight now.
The first thing that started happening was, in the middle of playing a song, it would freeze, and then start skipping through of the rest of the tracks on that playlist or album. It would sometimes make a "whirring" sound when going from track to track without playing them. Sometimes, this process would start instead when trying to manually skip from one song to another...it would just start to skip through tracks. It had to be restarted a bunch of times, and none of these problems had been present in the 2 or so years previous I owned it. Eventually, it showed an "unhappy face" and nothing else could be done.
I brought it back to Best Buy, where I bought it, as it was still under warranty for another year. They sent the iPod back to Apple for repairs. The "repaired" iPod was back in my hands in about 3 weeks, and for a week or so worked perfectly. Then, it started having the skipping tracks problem again.
Not long there after, it started having more serious problems. It needed to be resetted very frequently. The skipping of tracks, the first warning sign, became the least of it's problems. It needed to be completely restored. The first time it was restored, it got through about 600-1000 of the 5800 songs on it, then stopped and said the restore failed.
Other times, it showed the dreaded "1418" message. Other times it had messages like these:
Attempting to copy to the disk “Andrew’s iPod” failed. An unknown error occurred (-69).
The iPod “Andrew’s iPod” cannot be synced. The disk could not be read from or written to.
The iPod “Andrew’s iPod” cannot be synced. The required file cannot be found.
Eventually, it synced correctly. But the problems continued, and over the course of two weeks it had to be completely restored about 3 or 4 times, although it would then work again perfectly fine for, like, an hour.
So I took it back in again. This time, Best Buy told me that I would be quickly sent back a "Refurb" unit (a refurbished iPod that someone else had returned, I guess and had then been fixed or what have you.)
After a few days, I got the refurb unit. It's not my old iPod, I could tell just by looking at the front and back. And, for about 2 weeks, it worked absolutely perfectly. It reloaded like a charm, and played completely fine. The battery life seemed a little iffy, but nothing crazy.
Then, yesterday, this iPod that *is not* the same iPod I returned as far as I can tell, is having THE EXACT SAME PROBLEM. Yesterday, in the middle of a song that I had played many times before, it froze, stopped, and started skipping songs. It needed to be reset, what else is new. So, I did, and got the "unhappy face" with the address of iPod support once again.
I'm really confused. What is the problem here? When I had my first unit returned, I figured perhaps the problem hadn't been addressed. But this doesn't even appear to be the same unit.
Could there be a problem with iTunes 7.1.1 with my iPod? For what it's worth, I followed the advice found online to try to find corrupted music files, and can't find any. When it had restore problems with the last unit, I checked to see if it was stopping on any particular song, and it was different every time. Even so, I erased those songs just in case.
Also, when it freezes and stops now (and with the old unit, for that matter) it was never the same song. And it was almost always on a song that had already been played many times, perfectly fine, many times before, and recently to boot. I've also played through almost every song through iTunes over the last couple months to check for any obvious problems, and never found any.
With over 5750 songs on my iPod, I don't know how I can possibly know with complete certainty if there's anything with a problem amongst them, although completely erasing my iPod library that until 2 months ago never had a problem is kind of a worst case scenario.
What on earth could be wrong with my iPod? It's currently plugged into an outlet, vacillating between the Apple symbol and the "unhappy face." Anyone have ANY ideas?!?!?

Answer 1

I wondered what a 'photo' iPod was. This forum is for the 5G video. I don't know how long an iPod is supposed to last. I think it is based on use and how roughly it is handled if it is a hard-drive model.
Maybe time for a new machine?