[PacNW]

My 2008 is still weeks from delivery but I'm looking at options for music. I ordered the 6FL option to use with an old iPod Nano but I would like more space for a larger library.

Western Digital's web site mentions that some computers don't provide enough power and sells a "USB 2.0 Power Booster" Cable.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/acces...asp?ProdID=170

This dual-connector cable is designed specifically for the WD Passport™ portable USB drive. Normally, the USB port on the PC provides enough power to operate the drive. However, there are some models of computers that do not supply enough power for the drive to operate. In those rare cases, this cable can be used to power the drive using power from two USB ports on the system.

Fully certified high-speed USB 2.0 cable
Transfer rates up to 480 MB/s
Double type-A to single mini-B connector

Has anyone tried this solution, using the power outlet in the armrest with a USB adapter? I have a Belkin adapter from an old cell phone that is 4cm long so it should fit under the armrest even with the USB cable attached.

I'm a little concerned that the power on/off might not match the USB and power outlet but if the cable has correct diodes there should be no referse flow issues. WD engineered the cable for computers so they *should* have protection; it *may* work in the car well.

[amdave]

Originally Posted by jtmccabe

Where did you find the 500 mA spec?

In my case, I tried a Buffalo drive rated at 2.5W (2.5W/5V = 500 mA) but it did not work. I'm guessing that the 2.5W is the steady-state ("spun up") power consumption but the power during spin-up is over 2.5W.

I think there has to be more to it than that. Unless your computer USB ports offer different output (which they shouldn't if they're to spec). I don't think we can assume we're actually getting 5V at the plug in the armrest because that drive will spin up w/ no problem on a computer which *should* be producing the same voltage and current. I agree that the current requirements are higher on spin-up, but I don't think they're THAT much higher, otherwise I would expect similar problems from more PCs.

[amdave]

Also, Griffin Technologies has a new PowerJolt coming out soon that is a low profile universal USB plug. http://www.griffintechnology.com/pro...rjoltuniversal

[dknightx]

Does anybody know if there is a way to force the system to reindex your drive? I've got a Fujitsu 300GB drive that has been working flawlessly for several weeks now. I have about 110GB of music on there, about 16,000 mp3 files. For some reason, if I try to browse via index (i.e. artist, album, etc) I'm only seeing a portion of my collection (looks like less than half). If I browse the directory I'm able to see everything.

I've got my collection very well organized so the directory structure is pretty easy to use and I've been happy with it, but I'd still like to figure out how to get everything properly indexed.

Thanks.

-David

[dmichael]

Originally Posted by dknightx

Does anybody know if there is a way to force the system to reindex your drive? I've got a Fujitsu 300GB drive that has been working flawlessly for several weeks now. I have about 110GB of music on there, about 16,000 mp3 files. For some reason, if I try to browse via index (i.e. artist, album, etc) I'm only seeing a portion of my collection (looks like less than half). If I browse the directory I'm able to see everything.

I've got my collection very well organized so the directory structure is pretty easy to use and I've been happy with it, but I'd still like to figure out how to get everything properly indexed.

Thanks.

-David

David,

I bought the Fujitsu 300gb drive, due to arrive today. I won't have 110gb of music on there, more like 20gb or so, but I'll be able to tell you more if I run into that same problem even with only 20gb. I suspect that there may be some logical limitations in the USB interface within the software/hardware thats installed the car. Bluetooth has logical limitations of something like 500 phonebook contacts, you may have hit some type of limit with all those files.

Sounds like you have worked around that by creatively organizing folders. I only use a usb stick now, but what I did was create 26 folders, 1 each for every letter in the alphabet and put all the artists in each folder alphabetically and that as worked out well to drill down to a particular artist more quickly than scrolling through all artists to get down to U2 for example.

[dknightx]

Originally Posted by dmichael

I bought the Fujitsu 300gb drive, due to arrive today. I won't have 110gb of music on there, more like 20gb or so, but I'll be able to tell you more if I run into that same problem even with only 20gb. I suspect that there may be some logical limitations in the USB interface within the software/hardware thats installed the car. Bluetooth has logical limitations of something like 500 phonebook contacts, you may have hit some type of limit with all those files.

Sounds like you have worked around that by creatively organizing folders. I only use a usb stick now, but what I did was create 26 folders, 1 each for every letter in the alphabet and put all the artists in each folder alphabetically and that as worked out well to drill down to a particular artist more quickly than scrolling through all artists to get down to U2 for example.

I like that "26 folder" idea - I may "borrow" it

Let us know how things go with the Fujitsu. Mine is still running strong with no issues apart from ones that I believe are inherent to USB hard drives in general (i.e. slow skipping from song to song, takes about a minute to be recognized by the car on startup).

I'm also curious to hear how you go about mounting it. Mine is still sitting on the shelf next to the cup holder in the armrest, but I'd like to do something with the pouch to make it usable. This drive is a bit big for the pouch and it really needs to be relocated to be closer to the USB port, since the built-in cable is quite short.

-David

[dmichael]

On the Fujitsu 300GB drive; I love it. Turns out I only have 13gb of music on MP3's, but I have the same issue where it I only get to see DIR and I can only search on DIR, but with the 26 folder idea, I find it very quick and easy to drill down to any artist, album, song I want. I find scrolling to be as fast as my USB memory stick and the drive will only take about 10 seconds to load up on initial plug in. So far (I've only owned it for about 12 hours), if I shut off the car with the drive playing music, it picks up right were it left off on re-ignition. In fact this drive acts just like my USB stick drive except the stick would give me the option to search by ALB, ART, GENRE in addition to DIR. Ironically, searching through ART, ALB etc, is inconvenient because you have to scroll through too much if what your looking for is Warren Zevon.

I still may experiment, but it looks like this drive will work best with the attached short cable, so I am sticking with that since It won't fit in the pouch anyway.

One thing to be said for the iPod, playlists are a great feature that your only have with iPods, the only reason I don't like ipods is for the fact that they need to be recharged all the time, and I wonder if it would randomly stay powered on overnight and drain the cars main battery, probably unlikely, but the results are not pretty.

[jtmccabe]

Originally Posted by PacNW

Has anyone tried this solution, using the power outlet in the armrest with a USB adapter? I have a Belkin adapter from an old cell phone that is 4cm long so it should fit under the armrest even with the USB cable attached.

I'm a little concerned that the power on/off might not match the USB and power outlet but if the cable has correct diodes there should be no referse flow issues. WD engineered the cable for computers so they *should* have protection; it *may* work in the car well.

Yes, we've tried it (it's what we've been referring to as "supplemental power"), and no, it doesn't work. From one of my previous posts:

Originally Posted by jtmccabe

Hmmm... I tried that but in my car, the socket powers on/off with the ignition but the USB port powers on before you start the engine and it powers off a while after you stop the engine. So the drive would try to run without adequate power for a few minutes every time you drive the car. That can't be good for it.

The only way to work around this would be to wire up a relay to provide the extra power in sync with the USB port. That's way too much work IMO, so for me any drive that needs supplemental power is out of the question.

I don't think any of these cables have diodes in them, so if one conductor is at 5V and the other is driven to 0V, you would have a short. Luckily the power outlet is just an open circuit when it's off, rather than being driven to 0V.

[jtmccabe]

Originally Posted by amdave

I think there has to be more to it than that. Unless your computer USB ports offer different output (which they shouldn't if they're to spec). I don't think we can assume we're actually getting 5V at the plug in the armrest because that drive will spin up w/ no problem on a computer which *should* be producing the same voltage and current. I agree that the current requirements are higher on spin-up, but I don't think they're THAT much higher, otherwise I would expect similar problems from more PCs.

The USB spec states that the voltage supplied by the host is 5V ± some margin and the minimum current is 500 mA. There is no maximum on the current, which is why some hosts can power drives without supplemental power and others can't. All hosts should be around 5V but their current sourcing capacities are all over the map.

Keep in mind that there are lots of USB hosts and devices on the market that do not comply with the USB spec. Compliance testing is expensive and it's only necessary if you want to put the USB logo on your product, so we're lucky if our cars even meet the minimum 500 mA standard. I'm still not convinced of that, by the way.

[jtmccabe]

I ran some tests tonight to show you guys what's happening when we plug in drives that work and drives that don't work. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I don't have a current probe (just a voltage probe), so this only tells part of the story. These screen shots show what happens to the USB bus's 5V rail shortly after you plug the drive in. You can clearly see that the voltage has a harder time stabilizing when the bigger drive is plugged in.

First, take a look at what happens when you plug in a SanDisk 1 GB flash drive to a PC with plenty of power:



This is my 250 GB Buffalo drive plugged into the same PC:



This is the same flash drive plugged into the car. Not as pretty as with the PC, but still good enough to work:



And this is the Buffalo drive being plugged into the car. Notice that the voltage is never able to recover to the full 5V:



If/when I get my hands on a current probe, we'll see that the voltage is dropping more with the larger drive because the current demand is much higher.

[amdave]

Originally Posted by jtmccabe

Yes, we've tried it (it's what we've been referring to as "supplemental power"), and no, it doesn't work. From one of my previous posts:



I don't think any of these cables have diodes in them, so if one conductor is at 5V and the other is driven to 0V, you would have a short. Luckily the power outlet is just an open circuit when it's off, rather than being driven to 0V.

Wait... didn't you post in the lists earlier that some users are having success with supplemental power? I missed that last post of your about when the plug and port are activated - that'll screw with my low-profile dual USB carcharger project.

Btw, JTM, nice work with the voltage tester. That's good data.

[dmichael]

Originally Posted by dmichael

On the Fujitsu 300GB drive; I love it. Turns out I only have 13gb of music on MP3's, but I have the same issue where it I only get to see DIR and I can only search on DIR, but with the 26 folder idea, I find it very quick and easy to drill down to any artist, album, song I want. I find scrolling to be as fast as my USB memory stick and the drive will only take about 10 seconds to load up on initial plug in. So far (I've only owned it for about 12 hours), if I shut off the car with the drive playing music, it picks up right were it left off on re-ignition. In fact this drive acts just like my USB stick drive except the stick would give me the option to search by ALB, ART, GENRE in addition to DIR. Ironically, searching through ART, ALB etc, is inconvenient because you have to scroll through too much if what your looking for is Warren Zevon.

I still may experiment, but it looks like this drive will work best with the attached short cable, so I am sticking with that since It won't fit in the pouch anyway.

One thing to be said for the iPod, playlists are a great feature that your only have with iPods, the only reason I don't like ipods is for the fact that they need to be recharged all the time, and I wonder if it would randomly stay powered on overnight and drain the cars main battery, probably unlikely, but the results are not pretty.

Now that I have had a couple of days with the Fujitsu 300gb drive, I wanted to give you all an update as I said earlier that I only had the option to use DIR, but now I see that after about 5-7 mins of having the drive loaded up all the other options for searching do appear and they are all functional and as far as I can tell, all the music that i have on the drive is indexed properly and available. Again, I only have about 13gb of music on there so far, but I plan to burn more CD's and grow that number.

The HDD only takes about 30-60 seconds to load up and DIR is always immediately available. DIR is and always will be my search preference because I can scroll down the fastest by the alphabet folder system, and the more CD's you have the more it becomes a must. I should add that scrolling is very fast with non-i-drive. The only complaint I have is that I wish it would load up immediately at start-up, everything else is working flawlessly, although for those that like to search on GEN or ALB or ART, it takes 5 minutes after startup to have those functions become available. I also have playlists available, I just did not put any on the drive, and I don't think that Itunes/ipod playlists would be supported on a USB device so I guess I have to figure out how to create some playlists in a format that the car can understand, maybe windows media player will do that for me. I dunno.

jtmccabe, you can add me to the list as another user that found the Fujitsu RE25U300J 300GB 4200rpm to work very well. I use the attached cable(about 5-6 inches) plugged directly into the USB Port with no supplemental power.

I got this HDD at newegg for $160 free shipping. They have a 30 day return policy, but unless it dies on me in that timeframe, I will be keeping it. Plenty of BIN options for a similar price on ebay, most other retailers want over $200. The drive shows up in windows as MHX2300BT. So theoretically, one could buy the bare drive and fit it into an enclosure, I just don't see any commercially available enclosures that would be better than what fujitsu provides becauase they have foam rubber bumpers in all directions to protect the drive.

Wow, this is sounding like an infomercial, so let me say I have no affiliation with fujitsu, I don't own their stock, I just like the way this product works in my car, YMMV.

[jtmccabe]

Originally Posted by amdave

Wait... didn't you post in the lists earlier that some users are having success with supplemental power? I missed that last post of your about when the plug and port are activated - that'll screw with my low-profile dual USB carcharger project.

Sorry about that; what I meant was that it works in the sense that if you fix the power problem by using supplemental power, the car recognizes the drive and can play music from the drive. But the timing of the power port turning on and off makes it pretty inconvenient to use in practice.

Sure, it'll work, but you have to first plug in the power, then plug in the USB, then unplug the USB before you turn the car off, every time you drive. For most of us, that's way more trouble than it's worth, except maybe for long road trips. Now that I think about it, I should probably add an explanation to the list that "works with supplemental power" means that it only works in a somewhat inconvenient way.

dmichael, sounds like you have a winner there with the Fujitsu drive. I'll update the list when I get a chance. I haven't already counted you, have I? Was there another member using the Fujitsu before you?

[dknightx]

Originally Posted by dmichael

Wow, this is sounding like an infomercial, so let me say I have no affiliation with fujitsu, I don't own their stock, I just like the way this product works in my car, YMMV.

Glad you're liking the Fujitsu; I've had no issues from mine and in my opinion it is a bargain, especially if you need the storage capacity. I've always been pushing the limits of my iPods' capacities (whether it was a 40GB or more recently a 60GB) and now I can go nuts. This is giving me an opportunity to re-rip all my music at a much higher quality. I now have close to 120GB and haven't even filled half of my drive!

4200rpm drives are becoming hard to find it seems - snatch one of these up while you still can!

-Dave

[mrvuml]

I'm using a Western Digital Passport 60GB drive (5400rpm IIRC) but its a bit hit-and-miss as it only gets recognized about 50% of the time.
P.S. I'm using the short (about 12" long) thick cable that came with it.

[revel]

I love "teh iNternets"! I was pulling my hair out trying to find a drive that would work. I was using a USB to IDE/Sata cable from TigerDirect with a number of 2.5" IDE drives (4200/5400 Rpm). I can't really tell you for sure if it was that cable or the drives I was using that wasn't letting it work. Anyways I found this thread, ordered the Fujitsu 300 GB 4200 RPM (model RE25U300J) from Newegg. It is working perfectly. I tested it with a few hundered MB's of music, no problem... Now I'm in the process of putting a couple hundred GB's of music, I'll give an update if I have any problems.

My first post here. I am so glad I found this, it's exactly what I was looking for.

Thanks!

[jtmccabe]

Originally Posted by revel

I love "teh iNternets"! I was pulling my hair out trying to find a drive that would work. I was using a USB to IDE/Sata cable from TigerDirect with a number of 2.5" IDE drives (4200/5400 Rpm). I can't really tell you for sure if it was that cable or the drives I was using that wasn't letting it work. Anyways I found this thread, ordered the Fujitsu 300 GB 4200 RPM (model RE25U300J) from Newegg. It is working perfectly. I tested it with a few hundered MB's of music, no problem... Now I'm in the process of putting a couple hundred GB's of music, I'll give an update if I have any problems.

My first post here. I am so glad I found this, it's exactly what I was looking for.

Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback, revel.

That does it. We're 3 for 3 now on the Fujitsu drive so I went ahead and ordered one myself.

[jtmccabe]

Just so you all know, I've decided to start updating the original list I posted on page 1 of this thread rather than keep adding new lists. This will make the latest list easier to find.

[GeriFix]

Has anyone tried this in an E90?:

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10984

There is a favourable report of it working in an E60 here:
http://forums.e60.net/index.php?show...dpost&p=517162

[dmichael]

Originally Posted by GeriFix

Has anyone tried this in an E90?:

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=11041

There is a favourable report of it working in an E60 here:
http://forums.e60.net/index.php?show...dpost&p=517162

Haven't tried the Lacie, but seems pricey for the storage size, you can get 10 times the storage for about the same price at newegg on the Fujitsu drive.

Here is a link to specs of the the actual drive(MXH2300BT) inside the fujitsu 300gb;
http://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/HDD...bt-e-70402.pdf

I was surprised to see this drive draw up to 4.5v on spin up. Also, it has a 12.5mm height as opposed to 9.5mm (which is the more common size for latops). I was thinking it would be nice to recycle this drive into my laptop once flash drives increase in storage size and drop in price, but then again 4200rpm is not what your are looking for as far as speed goes in a laptop.

[jtmccabe]

Originally Posted by dmichael

I was surprised to see this drive draw up to 4.5v on spin up.

Just so we don't confuse anyone, that's 4.5W, not 4.5V. Someone has claimed that the car's port is rated at 2.5W, although that remains unsourced.

I haven't seen any "spin-up" power specs on other drives, so maybe the 4.5W is better than the others. The 1.6W read/write consumption is certainly good. Or maybe they put a capacitor in the enclosure to provide the extra little charge necessary to help the drive spin up.

[revel]

Originally Posted by revel

I love "teh iNternets"! I was pulling my hair out trying to find a drive that would work. I was using a USB to IDE/Sata cable from TigerDirect with a number of 2.5" IDE drives (4200/5400 Rpm). I can't really tell you for sure if it was that cable or the drives I was using that wasn't letting it work. Anyways I found this thread, ordered the Fujitsu 300 GB 4200 RPM (model RE25U300J) from Newegg. It is working perfectly. I tested it with a few hundered MB's of music, no problem... Now I'm in the process of putting a couple hundred GB's of music, I'll give an update if I have any problems.

My first post here. I am so glad I found this, it's exactly what I was looking for.

Thanks!

Update:
So I loaded 100GB of MP3's, (Around 25,000 songs). The drive it self is great, fast to copy to from PC etc. However, I have the regular non-idrive/non-nav stereo and it seems to have gotten laggy with so much music, compared to when I only had a few hundred MB's on the drive. For example, sometimes I would select a folder and it would not expand until 5 seconds pass. Other times it wouldn't expand the folder at all. However sometimes it was instant.

It has not indexed all the songs via ID3 tags yet, and I was messing with it on for probably 45mins. So all I have is the DIR option. Does anyone know when it does the indexing? (It did index quickly with only a small number of songs on the drive)

I used the A-Z folder method and it works pretty good, except for the problems above.

Also, It takes maybe 20 seconds for you to be able to select the "USB" option after you put the key in. And then once you select USB, its says "Loading..." for maybe another 20 seconds.

Thats all I have to report for now.


One final after thought, My folder structure is \A\Artist-AlbumName\Song.mp3 Maybe it only indexes to a certain folder depth? With my first test the album folders were right in the root. I will test it out.