I understood ‘brick’ just fine, though was confused how you could brick only half an iPod. I also got lost on this line ‘Do I have 30 gigs that I can never access on my Ipod?’ as it seems to be asking if there’re these mystical unaccessable 30 GB on his iPod which I couldn’t really relate back to the 50 GB free over the two HDs.
But brick…that I got.
Ditto- brick I got as well. But how having hard drives would riun his iPod went past me.
I think Meeko seemed to have a misunderstanding of the meaning of “brick”, myself.
Thank you. I was becoming anxious that I would get through the whole thread and still have no idea what “to brick (half) an iPod” meant. And that I’d be the only one to whom it wasn’t obvious.
I still don’t understand what the OP is asking, however.
The question made sense to me. My answer to the same dilemma was to buy a new computer with a bigger hard drive. 
Ah. Fifteen hours later, I get it. I think.
(I don’t own an iPod— is it typical for someone to maintain a backup of their entire iPod on their hard drive? I don’t think I would use it that way, if I did own one.)
You don’t have to, but that’s the way iTunes works by default. Instead of maintaining the files on the iPod directly, you maintain your library on your computer and the iPod just syncs with that.
It’s not that I use my hard drive as a backup for my mp3 player. I was putting songs on it before I got one. I use my PC in place of a home stereo. It’s much more convenient to look up an album in the Explorer and click on it to start playing music than it is to get a CD out of the case and put it in the stereo. I used to have a 60 disc changer, but like everything else mechanical, it started to wear down and quit working properly. In my case, my hard drive is a backup of my music collection, and not of my mp3 player. I haven’t actually played a CD for three or four years now.
It’s a good way to go, because it does give you a backup. That way, when you eventually get a new ipod it will automatically get all your music the first time you sync. If you keep your music on your ipod only, it’s gone if your ipod gets lost or stolen. Sure, you could re-rip and re-download it, but what a pain that would be.