Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Today I purchased a 1GB iPod shuffle at the San Francisco Apple Store. I chose the 1GB because I intend to use it for music and as a USB drive. As you may know, in order to use the shuffle as a USB drive, you have to specify in iTunes how much space is reserved for music and how much for user data. This is necessitated by the Autofill feature that can fill an iPod shuffle with just the right amount of random music from the iTunes library.

The interesting note here is that the data portion of the iPod shuffle in USB drive mode is formatted as Macintosh PC Exchange (FAT32 for all you Windows readers) by default. I think this is a great choice made by Apple because I use my USB drive across platforms often. I presume users who want an HFS+ -formatted iPod shuffle can use the erase function in Disk Utility to do so. (I have not tested that hypothesis.) The filesystem works similarly to the iPod. There is a hidden folder in the root of the drive named iPod_Control that contains the device’s music.