How Long Does It Take to Fill an iPod?

Have you ever timed it? I just got a new iPod classic, with a capacity of 160 GB, to replace the one I broke the other day. I can fill the iPod’s capacity (which is actually 148.87 GB) easily, as my music library – not counting podcasts and audiobooks – is currently just shy of 300 GB.

I had never timed how long it took with my previous classic, but this one does seem to copy just a bit faster; maybe the hard disk is slightly more rapid than the older one (it was a two-year-old model). So to give you an idea how long it takes to fill that much space, here are two numbers. First, in two hours, I was able to copy about 112 GB of data to the device; that’s .93 GB per minute. To fill the iPod entirely (a tad less, actually, because I didn’t fill it to the brim; I left about 6 GB of free space), it took about 2 hours and 45 minutes, or about .86 GB per minute. So it seems to get slower as it goes along.

I tried with my 16 GB nano to see how fast that was. I had always had the impression that it copied faster than the hard-drive-based classic, but it turns out that I was wrong, and it just seemed faster because it holds – and copies – so much less. In my unscientific (ie, not timed with a stopwatch) test, the iPod nano copied about .6 GB per minute.

My 1st generation iPod touch is a different animal altogether. First, to simply delete files takes a long time; I finally force quit iTunes after 11 minutes, because it was beachballing. When I restarted, the music had been deleted, however, so there’s probably something that got borked along the way. Copying files to the iPod touch was very slow: after 15 minutes, it had copied a mere 2.7 GB, or roughly .18 GB per minute. It took 2 hours and 10 minutes to copy 13 GB of files. (Could any readers with more recent iPod touches comment as to whether they have similar copy times? Because this means that a 64 GB iPod touch would take about 9 hours (!!!) to fill.)

So when you get a new iPod and fill it, you may find that it takes a while. These numbers will give you a better idea how long you have to wait to get all your music on the iPod.

Update: December 1, I have received a new 32 GB iPod touch. I decided to buy it in part because mine was old (and there are features on the new one I don’t have), and was also suckered by Apple’s black Friday discount. In any case, the copy speed is impressive. In the first minute, it copied about 800 MB of music; faster than the nano, but still slower than the classic. It took 14 minutes to copy a total of 11.4 GB of music files, so that’s roughly .81 GB per minute, a respectable speed. I must therefore assume that either my original iPod touch was very slow, or that there was a problem with it.