Michael 182 wrote:
Why would altitude affect a hard drive?

Because the hard drive head "flies" over the platter. The tolerances
are tight enough and things move quickly enough inside the drive that
the air has a big affect on how close the read/write head gets to the
disc platter, and the drive is designed with this in mind.

Take the air away, and the head that was supposed to be hovering a few
mils over the disc is now scratching up the surface on which the data is
stored. Not a recipe for reliable long-term data storage.

See the following page for more detail:
http://www.storagereview.com/guide20.../opHeight.html

FWIW, I run my iPod at high altitudes all the time with no failures.

Then somebody did a good job designing the hard drive in it, assuming
that it has a hard drive. The iPod Shuffle uses flash ram instead of a
hard drive and should work in a vacuum -- even if listening to music in
a vacuum appears to be impractical. :-)

-Luke