I defrag'd my 15 gig iPod last night. I don't know how long it took, because it used up the whole battery before I woke up in the morning. Luckily it apparently finished before the battery died.
I thought the iPod was supposed to get power while it was plugged in ... but maybe only with Firewire and not with USB 2.0, which is what I'm using.
Later, I recharged the iPod battery to full, and ran the disk check program on it. Again, it finished before the battery died, but no way eight hours went by before the battery was used up. I wasn't watching, but I'll guess about three or four hours tops.
This supports my claim that the disk drive is the single biggest drain on the iPod battery - because running the disk check program hammers on the hard drive and does nothing else.
Apple says the iPod will buffer up 25 minutes of music into RAM - so it only wakes up the hard drive every 25 minutes, if you listen to a playlist in order. (So this is another way to extend battery time - use a playlist, so the iPod knows what to play next, and can buffer it all up at once.) According to an interview with Steve Jobs, the latest iPods have longer battery life, not because the battery is better, but because the power management component of the iPod is "much more aggressive."
If you want to use up your battery, jump in a random fashion from one song to another without listening to very much of each one.
Hey - it's Jack again. I may have to sign up to quit having to anonymously post. A couple of things--1) yeah, you have to have firewire to have power. It's almost worth it to buy a card. I rarely have to plug mine in away from the PC (except on road trips). 2) I move a lot of music in and out of my iPod, and it was only 2% fragmented. I could see why it would get fragged up if you were actually editing files on the iPod, but with music, I guess it pretty easily does contiguous writes. 3) The whole power thing is a little weird. Yeah, because I am a dabbler, and usually listen to a couple of tunes from one CD and then another, I can see the battery drain as I skip around the hard disk playing a tune here and a tune there. They also say the backlight is a big culprit. I read somewhere (maybe iPod lounge) that the clock is also a huge culprit. That makes sense because if you leave a fully charged pod sitting around and pick it up again a few days later--it's dead, or nearly dead. Apple is totally weasely about all of this. Right before I'd had my iPod a year, it got down to where the battery only lasted an hour. After weaving my way through their labyrinthian service wall, I got them to service it for $30 shipping. They of course, just send a brand new pod... /jack
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