ipod harddrive space...

I haven't seen this covered anywhere else, so I figured I'd ask here...

Over the past six months or so, I've noticed my amount of free space on my iPod's harddrive has gone down (probably from constantly writing to it). I'm down to 27.72 GB free, from at least 27.80 last week (though I did a library wipe and re-inserted everything) and I'm sure I was over 28 when it was new. My questions:

1. Will the amount of space continue to go down or is there a limit to where it can go down? I don't want to keep writing to it if I keep losing space...

2. Is there any way to recover lost space, short of replacing the harddrive?

Thanks!

Jam it back in, in the dark.

It could be the hard drive has minor damage and so the damaged sectors are being written off. Wether or not iPods do that I wouldn't know.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Try formatting the iPod and see if that brings the total space available back to what it was previously. If that doesn't work, you should run it's diagnostic tools to check for possible hardware issues like Roph suggested. Getting to the diag screen requires you to do a soft reset (hold down the center and menu button), then when the screen flashes to the apple logo, to hold down the center and left button. The diag menu will show up then, and the tests are self-explanatory from then. This page can help determine what the results mean.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.