Headunit using usb attachment harddrive

[hotwired_78]

Does anyone have this done? I mean. I WANT a music library in my car. or better yet, if I buy a cheaper indash dvd player, a movie/music library! Fabbing up a slot for a removable harddrive shouldn't be an issue. Problem is powering the HD and reading compatibility issues.

just wanted to know if anyone has successfully accomplished this. i've always wanted one.

[introvert]

Most decent aftermarket head units support USB drives. You can do the same thing with a flash/thumb drive or a usb hard drive. The thing you will run into is that traditional spindle-based hard drives is that they have slow seek times which leads to slow loading, slow file browsing, etc. I'd suggest ipod or flash drives for a decent mix of price, performance, resiliency against temperature/vibration and capacity.

Personally, I installed a bluetooth enabled Kenwood and have my iPod stashed in there hidden. I usually stick with the ipod for most music instances and use my iphone via bluetooth for Pandora. Neither one can match up to the audio quality of a standard CD, so I'll use regular discs for certain types of music. My head unit also has a 1/8" mini-din aux port, so I can toss in other audio devices that only support headphone jacks. Coupled with MP3 discs, the music options are almost limitless.

[hotwired_78]

I read that the head units cannot read the plugin harddrive because of the lack of plug and play drivers for HD's on the head unit. Has this been fixed with new firmware? All the threads I seem to find are a couple years old. (even outside of ephatch). I'd love to just shove a solid state hard drive in there and make a tray to pull it out when i want to hook it up to my computer. I have an ipod touch, but it only holds 16gigs. I was just wondering/speculating. thanks for your input!

[dirtyMETHOD]

I just bought an AVIC x910BT and will be installing an external harddrive. I'm hacking and modding the HU to get rid of the bugs ppl complain about. It runs on Windows CE so there can be alot of modifications developed for the unit. I'm going for a 250Gig USB external HD in my glove box since that is where I'm routing the usb cable. I'll chime back in here once I have this thing installed and ready to go.

[TTownEP]

I'm running a 60gb HDD in my car. It's actually the old one from my PS3, haha, but everything I have fits on it. It works great, I bought an enclosure that only needs the .5 amps my Alpine HU puts out. I had another enclosure that wouldn't work, because it needed too much power. I also attempted my other full size 5.25 external HDD, and it worked, but I had to stuff it all under the seat and power it with an inverter. But my current setup works fine, except for a couple points:
1. The file tree has to be painstakingly organized to jive well with the HU. I'm actually still working on a good way to organize everything so that it reads it all, and I can find what I need. It can have 100 folders in the root directory, up to a total of 500 across the whole HDD, with up to 100 files in each folder. So theoretically you could fit 50,000 songs. I have yet to get all this worked out. I have all my music in there, but it's only reading a few of the folders, so there's lots of folders it is skipping over because I don't have something set up right.
2. Since the file tree has to be perfectly organized, it can be a chore getting to what you want sometimes.
3. It doesn't read playlist files, so that's out the window.

The load and seek times are really not bad at all. It can index everything on a fresh boot-up in about 6-8 seconds, I estimate. I have about 6,000 songs in there. Tracking through is at least as fast as a CD, maybe faster. If you use the scroll wheel to drill down into a specific folder and file, it plays it within a second of selecting it. Speed is absolutely NOT an issue.

The head is an Alpine CDA-105. A pretty low-end Alpine, but it had everything I needed, and I just couldn't put one of those cheap-looking Sony, Pioneer, JVC or whatever units in there.