Want an iPod on your run? Don’t take the video

We’ve all seen the hordes running, cycling, and aerobicizing while grooving to their iTunes. A new theory, however, says that if those iPod enthusiasts who take their music sources on their training endeavors with them aren’t using the smallest of the Pods, then they’re risking damage and possibly catastrophic failure.

The difference is in the method of memory storage. Those iPod videos and large-memory models have hard drives in them (duh), in order to store thousands of songs and hundreds of video files. Those hard drives are much more prone to difficulty when bumped or moved repeatedly—exactly the kind of activity that you would expect if you had one strapped to your forearm while doing a track workout. It is logical to think that too much movement can drive the hard disk out of sync, and eventually, self-destruct.

The nano and shuffle models of iPod, on the other hand, are USB flash drives that have no moving parts. You can bounce a shuffle around as much as you want and not hear a skip or risk memory loss. The drawback is that you can’t store a bazillion songs on one of these smaller models or watch a video; but if you’re running or at the gym, you probably won’t be wanting to watch video anyway.

The newly announced Nike+iPod Sport Kit is designed specifically for the iPod nano listener.

I, for one, can testify to the vulnerability of the larger iPod. I have one of the older, larger models. I used to run with it five days a week. Now, it just won’t work right. My nano, however, is still going strong thousands of miles later.