Using the 5th generation ipod with the battery taken out

Question

Hello everyone. My battery recently died and I thought instead of buying a new one I would just use it without the battery inside. I removed the battery from the ipod and it can only be used if it is plugged into a power source. Since I primarily used my ipod in my car (which has a AUX adapter for the ipod) I thought I might as well just keep it in the car. I was wondering if using the ipod only while it's plugged in with no battery would damage the ipod or force my car to put a higher charge into the ipod and therefore deplete my car battery faster. Anyone have any suggestions? Thank you!

Answer 1

Kenichi Watanabe wrote:
... if the power source for the iPod stays ON when you turn OFF the ignition, that would be fine; the iPod has continuous power until you turn it OFF. However, if the power source goes OFF when when turn your key to shut off your engine, and the iPod is ON at that time, it would suddenly lose power. If the iPod as a battery, it just runs off the battery at that point. If it has no battery, it is being shut OFF unexpectedly.
I assume the iPod's hard drive works the same way as ones I've worked on in the past. That is, while running, the read heads (the little arm that moves across the hard drive disks and finds the information) are prevented from hitting the hard disk by the fact that the disk is turning. (It's a bit more involved than that, but I've simplified it - I hope!) When told to "power off", the read head arm is told to return to home and uses power to do this, then powers off. I think the danger in the above scenario would be that with a sudden removal of power, the hard disk would not be able to return the read heads to home and this means the read mechanism would crash into the disk itself. This is known as a head crash - it's not good.
I'm surprised to read that this iPod works with no battery in it. Normally, if the battery in the iPod is fully drained, when connected up to a power source nothing happens for a while and then a message appears saying "please wait, batttery very low". At this point, the iPod will not work. In other words, until the iPod senses that it has enough power to run on its own (and protect the hard drive), it will not run at all. So with no battery in it, how does it sense the "sufficient reserve" condition?