How to Turn Your iPhone Or iPod Touch Into a Disk Drive

If you are the owner of one of these two devices than you might have noticed that they lack the ability being used as an extra disk drive for your computer and even though they have so many features already built-in, using your iPod touch or iPhone as a portable hard drive really does have its benefits.

Why use an iPhone or iPod touch as an extra hard drive?

Say that you have a few hundred pictures that you want to transfer from your computer to your device or some important files that you simply don't want to have stored in your computer. Whenever you face this scenario you run into the problem that your device doesn't really have an Explorer interface which will let you drag and drop specific files from your computer into your device without having to use some sort of wizard but in this case none of these two devices even has one to begin with, so what you do?

The solution

A new add-on application called the iPhone Explorer was developed for iTunes eight and nine. Basically this little add-on will let you use iTunes as an Explorer window which will allow you to search for specific files in your computer, select them and drop them in your iPod touch or iPhone.

Being able to transfer files from your computer to your device is rather useful because these usually have a rather large hard drive (from 7 GB all the way to 60 GB) and if you want to back up certain files but don't have a flash drive, a blank DVD or a series of CDs at hand and you can always use your portable media device as your plan B.

The best part about using this handy application is that you have to modify the software that came with your device which is often referred to as jail breaking. When you jail break an iPhone you are voiding the phone's warranty according to Apple so this is something that not many people are willing to do in order to gain extra functionality.

Those who are successful at jail breaking an iPhone are able to use applications from unofficial installers such as Rock App, Cydia, Icy and even pirated applications. It is important not to confuse jail breaking with SIM unlocking, this later one refers to the modification of the phone so that it will accept an SIM card without restriction such as a country or network carrier.