Car Tech forum: Car Stereo with USB; portable hard drive questions

I have tried the Pexagon Store-It 2.5" and 1.8" drives. The head unit will not power the 2.5", but will power the 1.8". However, the unit will not read music files from the 1.8". Has anyone been able to find a drive that will work? I'm waiting for another response from Kenwood, but their first response was to review this page - http://www.kenwood.com/usb/english.html. Unless I'm missing something, the 1.8 Store-It drive meets these requirements, and still won't work.

That's great news!!! I looked for a LaCie Mobile drive, and found several. Which specific model did you end up getting? I can't wait to get this up and running! Thanks for your input.

After buying 2 duds, and whole lot of web searching I finally went out and bought the 'LaCie Mobile 80GB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive' from Best Buy for $149 (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7625251&type=product&id=1130986104067). IT WORKS!!!! The load time is kind of long (about 65s, and I have a very simple folder structure), but well worth it when I can listen to ALL 20 gigs of my music, with space to add lots more. Just put it on random and you have your own radio station. Hopefully this helps you all out.

Jutz, drop me an email or message on my Myspace. I wanted to discuss the particulars on the file structure and hard drive selection. I'm helping my brother with his newly installed Kenwood 535u (?) receiver that has a USB port with a 500mA max ouput. I'd appreciate it. From what I gather through research any drive that is self powered with a spindle speed of 4200RPMs draws a current load that is less than 500ma.

Bill, I have a pioneer and I have been work on the same problem that you are having. Is what I have found out the last two days is that you radio is only able to read fat32 formate and your hard drive is in ntfs formate. Now I had 80gig hard drive that was fat32 formate that work great and I love It know it broke so I went and bought a 250gig harddrive its in ntfs formate. I brought that harddrive to bestbuy to the geeksquad and they had to divide in to partitions of 30gig in fat32 formate and thats is working great. I use most of the partitions for music then I use couple of the partitions for make play lists.

Jutz:
I have a similar amount of music as you, and it's separated into albums, each with its own folder. The songs on each album have number prefixes in their titles (01, 02, 03 etc), so if I combined all the albums from one artist, the order of songs will be wrecked - all the first songs will play first, then the second songs, etc. My unit (Kenwood KDC-MP642U) is limited to 255 folders "per device" (connected to USB) and 255 files per folder. Do you know any way around this limitation, without having to rename every file in my collection?

Thanks
Brian

Normally Portable hdd wont work well on Car USBs. The player cant supply enough power for the HDD. Soon ur hdd will spoil too. The error in files will start to appear. Just use a thumb drive, the best solution. I tried a full 40GB. oso have many errors

Im not an Ipod person so I dont know about that, but...

I can tell you the Kenwood lets you choose search modes i.e. folder, artist, album, song. It also has voice (when using kenwood phatnoise) so you can watch the road rather than the deck.

Very happy so far.

Does anyone know if you can connect a Sony K750i or W800 mobile phone to a Kenwood w6534u and if the usb reader can see it? It would be great, since my phone would charge up while I drive and I can play the AAC or Mp3 files using the phones memory stick, a fully intergrated system :o)

I was looking on another page, www.everythingusb.com, and this is what they say about USB drive power usage.

"Some 2.5" USB hard drives require up 900mA to start up, more than 500mA a USB port can provide; so, they will require a second USB cable just for borrowing power or a AC adapter. 1.8" USB hard drives wouldn't have the same problem as it only requires 450mA to spin up."

So it looks like the best bet is to start with a 1.8" drive.

I am getting ready to buy the Kenwood KDC-PM632U CD deck with USB input and found some information on what you need to put a 2.5" hard drive in:

1: The Kenwood decks need a hard drive that is formatted to FAT 16 or FAT 32. Anything else won't work with Kenwood.

2: The Kenwood deck only puts out .5 Amps of current through the USB, most hard drives need 1.0. I have found that you can get a Universal USB Cigarette lighter adapter that will allow you to plug any USB cable into your cigarette lighter (www.extremepda.com). This will easily supply the power needed. So you will need to look for a hard drive that has a secondary power input. I found the LaCie drives have this, they also include the USB-powersharing cable so you don't have to purchase it seperately.

I am quite disappointed in Kenwood and the other care stereo companies for not seeing the great possibilities of connecting larger hard drives to car stereos. The next step they need to take is to start making stereos with hard drives already installed. I know that most of the stereos with navigation are using larger hard drives, but I have an atlas and don't want to spend $1000 or more just for a hard drive.

From what I have found for deals online I can get the Kenwood deck, LaCie 120Gb hard drive and a few extra install parts for about $250.00, and I will never need to carry another CD in my car again.

Good luck to everyone else out there thinking big!

-AHoh

If the multimedia player shows up as a USB drive in Windoze, the headunit should read it too.

FWIW, a while back Woot was blowing out the Omnifi DMP1 car hard drive player for about $100. This unit originally sold for about 5 times that. It only has a 20 gig drive stock, but can be upgraded. There's open-source replacement software for it now that makes it more useful. You can find them on eBay regularly.

Has anyone tried this receiver with a 16GB USB flash drive? I'm wondering how much faster the load times would be than with a 40/80/120GB hard drive.

I've had a 160gb PassPort 2.5 USB drive attached to a generic Chinese Audio/video head unit for about 6 months. A few observations:
1. I use a Y-adapter and a 5v USB power adapter ($5). Plug the power adapter into an unused cigarette or power outlet, one USB to it and the other to the head unit. Works like a champ with no power worries.
2. My particular unit doesn't recognize any file structure more than one folder deep, so it makes organizing your music a bit tedious, as all albums reside at the same level, but that's just this unit.
3. It plays videos off the disk without a hitch (only when I'm stopped, right?).
4. Startup when cold is a definite problem, though not so much here in Las Vegas. Still, a good 1 to 2 minutes before the head unit will read the disk correctly.
5. For music playback, I think a stick is the way to go. If you have the bucks, a SSD would probably give the best combo of storage and performance. With the power adapter and a good external case, you are really only limited by the size of available 1.8 or 2.5 disks.

My Kenwood has USB also. not the same as yours but I have a
Lexar 8 GB flash drive and it works perfect. album name, song name ect. and it cost like $30 bucks at offic max. Holds a lot of music