I solved a minor oddity with my iPod Mini. Every time I put my Mac to sleep with the iPod attached via USB2, when I wake the machine, I get an error message that one of the drives (the iPod obviously) was not disconnected properly. This actually corrupted the iPod disk once, but that’s not such a big deal, just reformat, reload, and it’s back in operation.
I finally figured out that iPods require a native USB2 port. My PowerMac MDD dual-1Ghz only has USB1 so I added an Adaptec USB2 card. Unfortunately, that isn’t good enough, you must have a USB2 port that is built in to the machine, an aftermarket USB2 card won’t work. The iPod Mini only comes with a USB2 cable, so I bought the inexpensive iPod Firewire cable, not the expensive dual FireWire/USB2 cable, just the plain old FireWire cable.
Now everything works fine. When my Mac goes to sleep, the iPod automatically disconnects, and reconnects when the CPU wakes from sleep. I must have read this somewhere, I don’t recall where, it’s pretty obscure, so I figured I’d post it so if someone is Googling for info, they could find it out easily.