This was bought to augment an ipod nano - the idea was to have an ipod which was big enough to hold all my collection. As I don't have videos, 80gb is plenty big enough.

Out of the box the music and podcast bits worked fine - I did have to update both itunes and the ipod firmware - and this went without a hitch.

The auto sync facility worked first time - the big advantage of the big HDD is that I can simply sync up the whole music collection and this makes the process a lot easier. Adding podcasts was also easy.

An irritation is that when the "sync music" option is selected in the Music tab on itunes then when you click "Music" in the left frame just under the ipod name, all the music on the ipod is shown greyed out so you can't play music from the ipod etc. If you deselect "sync music" then this functionality returns.

Another real irritant is that in cover flow (on the ipod but not on itunes) you get lots of duplicate folders appearing for compilation albums (ie where all the artist are different). I've tried all the various work rounds suggested on newsgroups (it seems to be a common problem), but have not found a reliable solution.

The picture facility was far less slick for me. Apparently it works seamlessly with some Adobe products (see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1389?viewlocale=en_U S). I've still not figured out how you can make itunes import from several folders so I have to put all the photos in one folder. Also itunes creates a series of folders called "ipod photo cache" on you PC - there is an FAQ about that here - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1389?viewlocale=en_U S

Finally Apple's help is based on the premise that their software is largely pretty intuitive. Mostly it is, but in places it isn't and then the help is not detailed enough - adding photos is an example of this.