[100mph]

I just wanted to confirm that at least a western digital passport portable hard drive (WD Passport HDD) works great with 6FL and if just solely for use with 6FL will save you hundreds over an ipod with some great advantages...

I had read somewhere that someone couldn't get the WD Passport to work and out of the box can confirm that at least for me it wouldn't

BUT formatting it again to Fat32 (came that way) with a program called fat32format (google it - from co. called Ridgecrop) worked like a charm and 6FL recognized it right away.

One note of caution, don't put all your mp3's in one folder or on the root directory - it takes far too long to index.

I started out that way but realized if I put them in folders (a-z) it would generate the 'directory' within a few minutes and after about an hour it had fully indexed 7000 songs (28GB) and I had full access to albums, artists, playlists etc EXACTLY like they are in an IPOD.

Some advantages over an IPOD too.

1. Fully digital - I didnt notice much difference but it is

2. You can mount the WD Passport nicely to the underside of the armrest (velcro) and get rid of that stupid, clunky ipod 'cable' (they couldnt have integrated that into 6FL???) and free up some valuable storage space.

3. It works EXACTLY the same as an IPOD (nano at least), boots up just as fast (after first indexing), changes songs just as fast and costs HUNDREDS of $$$ less.

Also playlists work in M3U format but you need to edit them a little - I used Winamp to create the playlist. Using wordpad or notepad I then simply removed the drive info from the playlist -ie playlist would be e:/folder/song.mp3 - I just used the find and replace edit to remove the e: so that they are just /folder/song.mp3

So now I get can in my 335i and cruise for 20 straight days without repeating a song - still a tough call though - listen to music or the engine!

[Spool]

I have this thing....it came with my Camera for free





WD passport external HD, powered by USB. 5400RPM

this would work?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136057

[100mph]

Originally Posted by Spool

I have this thing....it came with my Camera for free





WD passport external HD, powered by USB. 5400RPM

this would work?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136057

Yep, looks like the same one I have but mine is 160GB version.

If it doesnt work as is just format it with the formatfat32 program I mentioned above.

[Spool]

sheesh, 160 gigs? You can put every single song ever recorded in 24 different languages.


Would this work with TV nav and go? store movies in here and play it through the Nav?

[OC Guy]

I'm not sure if this is a good solution. Hard disk platters don't like vibration, impact, or heat. All of these factors are very present in our cars. I can imagine the hard drive crashing and data loss.

[dinkoh]

Originally Posted by OC 335i

I'm not sure if this is a good solution. Hard disk platters don't like vibration, impact, or heat. All of these factors are very present in our cars. I can imagine the hard drive crashing and data loss.

Good point/question.

[100mph]

Originally Posted by OC 335i

I'm not sure if this is a good solution. Hard disk platters don't like vibration, impact, or heat. All of these factors are very present in our cars. I can imagine the hard drive crashing and data loss.

Well I figure it this way...

1. WD calls this thing a portable hard drive so I'm going to assume they've built in some ruggedness.

2. Heat - have you ever touched a harddrive running inside a PC or Laptop? I don't know the temps but they feel much hotter than my WD Passport sitting in my car on a 90 degree day.

3. And don't Ipod's other than Nano's use a hard disk platter for memory? At least the olders larger ones do -see points 1 and 2.

So I really am not anticipating any problems - WD offers a 3 year warranty and I have plenty of space on PC's to backup the drive in case of failure.

[OC Guy]

Originally Posted by 100mph

1. WD calls this thing a portable hard drive so I'm going to assume they've built in some ruggedness.

Not trying to start an argument but there is a distinctive difference between a portable hard drive than a hard drive on the move. When WD designed the HD their intentions were from move to one place to another, then be used stationary at a computer. Not to be spinning and incurring shock while running.

2. Heat - have you ever touched a harddrive running inside a PC or Laptop? I don't know the temps but they feel much hotter than my WD Passport sitting in my car on a 90 degree day.

The heat in your car much hotter when sitting for hours on a 90 degree day. Prolonged exposure to heat may cause data loss. There is a reason hard drives fail when there is inadequate cooling. This may not happen right away, but the effects could take its toll over time.

3. And don't Ipod's other than Nano's use a hard disk platter for memory? At least the olders larger ones do -see points 1 and 2.

So I really am not anticipating any problems - WD offers a 3 year warranty and I have plenty of space on PC's to backup the drive in case of failure.

IPods are designed differently with different uses in mind. Even non-Nano Ipods are not good for running (there are documented cases). Good luck.

Info on Ipod from Apple:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.h...num=60920#faq9
Skip Protection

Question: Can I use iPod while running, or doing other activities? Will my music skip?
Answer: iPod was designed for people with an active lifestyle. It is compact and lightweight enough to take with you wherever you go. It was designed to fit comfortably in the palm of your hand or to be slipped into a pocket or purse for easy transport. iPod offers up to 20 minutes of skip protection — twice that of other hard drive-based MP3 players on the market — so you can enjoy outdoor athletic activities without missing a beat. Also check out the skip-free iPod shuffle and iPod nano.

Question: How does iPod provide skip protection?
Answer: In addition to the hard drive, iPod has a memory cache. It is made up of solid-state memory, meaning that it has no mechanical or moving parts, so it is not affected by movement of the device. iPod skip protection works by preloading up to 25 minutes of music to the cache at a time. iPod plays music from the memory cache rather than the hard drive, so even rigorous activities won't cause music to skip.

Info straight from WD:
Environmental Specifications
Temperature (English)
Operating 41° F to 104° F

[DasBlitz]

OC335i brings up very good points. Don't think he is trying to attack you just give some good advice.

I mean we don't want you doing this and next thing you know your harddrive messes up. Money wasted.

Now many people have carputers and such. Which obviously use harddrives. Difference being is they most likely have fans for them. If it works out for you great. Just try and always keep it cool and take care of it and it should be fine.

[dinkoh]

Originally Posted by 100mph

One note of caution, don't put all your mp3's in one folder or on the root directory - it takes far too long to index.

I started out that way but realized if I put them in folders (a-z) it would generate the 'directory' within a few minutes and after about an hour it had fully indexed 7000 songs (28GB) and I had full access to albums, artists, playlists etc EXACTLY like they are in an IPOD.

100mph, I'm assuming you are designating the A-Z directories as artist's names? Can you post some sample pics of what the interface looks like?

[OC Guy]

Originally Posted by DasBlitz

OC335i brings up very good points. Don't think he is trying to attack you just give some good advice.

I mean we don't want you doing this and next thing you know your harddrive messes up. Money wasted.

Thanks. Also, I would not recommend products like this to others without knowing any potential limitations to the hardware.

I would contact Western Digital and see what they recommend even though the inside temperatures of the car already exceed the recommended operating temperatures.

Contact WD here:
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc....ted=1060098616

or at
westerndigital@custhelp.com

[100mph]

Hey I'm glad people are chiming in on this - one way or another we'll know 'the truth' given enough time and experimentation. I appreciate the advice and take it just as that - I'll be the guinea pig on this one, there's really not much to lose by trying...

As I said I have all my mp3's backed up on my PC no worries about data loss and with a 3 year warranty even if I have to get it replaced a few times for $100 I'm ok with that (btw its longer and probably a better warranty than an ipod).

As for temps this is what WD says

Environmental Specifications
Temperature (English)
Operating 41° F to 104° F
Non-operating -4° F to 149° F

So I'm feeling that 149F when the car is sitting should be fine and 104F when I'm using it should be fine too considering the armrest has A/C

And here's apples specs - hmmm WD seems to be better!
Environmental requirements

* Operating temperature: 32° to 95° F (0° to 35° C)
* Nonoperating temperature: -4° to 113° F (-20° to 45° C)

Vibrations, well perhaps overtime or some bigger potholes they could be a problem but so far a few days and some pretty aggressive driving and I've not had it skip, hiccup or otherwise - perhaps that its stuck with velcro to the underside of the armrest gives it a little shock resistance

Dinkoh - yes A to Z directory is for artist names - for another reason I had taken all my MP3's out of their artist/album folders so this was my quickest solution but if you have yours sorted in artist/album folders I would assume it would work but perhaps take longer indexing more folders.

Here's some pics of the 'install' and menus

Last pic is of my Genre's - followed the advice on the board and changed genres to the first letter of the bands name - makes it much easier to find a particular band vs rolling through the 'artists' one at a time

[drwtsn32]

Originally Posted by OC 335i

I'm not sure if this is a good solution. Hard disk platters don't like vibration, impact, or heat. All of these factors are very present in our cars. I can imagine the hard drive crashing and data loss.

I seriously doubt you'll experience a shock great enough just driving around to damage a hard drive.

That being said, iPods (at least the HD-based ones) are in the same boat anyway.

[iatacs19]

These hard disks are actually more resilient than people think.

Would I use it to store valuable data? NO

But, it is an excellent application in this case. If 100mph loses his mp3s b/c of a hdd failure I don't think it will be such a big deal as he will have them on his main PC.

I was thinking of doing this myself, but I thought that the 6FL USB port didn't provide enough mA to run a hard disk. My utmost concern was burning out the 6FL/USB port, I guess that theory is out the window. I will look into this more closely, I am going to search for a 4,200rpm drive and try that same thing. This thread gives me hope and I can stop wasting money on the 8GB USB memory keys I have been buying so far.

Good field test 100mph~!

[100mph]

Hey drwtsn32 - good to see you over here too... Ipod comparison is my whole point - if an IPOD is in the same boat for vibration, temperatures etc I think with the shear cost of a WD over an Ipod the WD wins hands down.

Just gave it a little unintentional test - was sitting at a light and wanted something out of the armrest. The light turned green and without even thinking about it I slammed down the armrest, hard enough to loosen the velcro a little and... nothing happened, song kept playing, never skipping a beat.

As far as the power draw, WD doesnt seem to have any specs but I figured if BMW puts in a USB port they'd surely have enough common sense to power it to USB specs, after all its not like the car doesn't have it (power). You do need a 'laptop' type hard drive though - no full size HDD will be powered by USB - they definitely need a separate power supply - but then again you do have a 12v power source right beside the USB.

And once again, car has 4 year warranty and WD has 3 so other than some possible inconvenience whats there to lose??

[drwtsn32]

Hey 100mph, regarding how you mounted the WD Passport... did your car come with an ipod storage sleeve in that spot? If so does it come off easily?

I grabbed a WD 160GB drive to try out, and it didn't seem to work. Even though it was formatted FAT32 at the factory, the key seems to be reformatting it using the utility you mentioned in your first post. Is that correct?

[E90Boy]

We need to DIY this, I'm really interested.

[100mph]

Originally Posted by drwtsn32

Hey 100mph, regarding how you mounted the WD Passport... did your car come with an ipod storage sleeve in that spot? If so does it come off easily?

I grabbed a WD 160GB drive to try out, and it didn't seem to work. Even though it was formatted FAT32 at the factory, the key seems to be reformatting it using the utility you mentioned in your first post. Is that correct?

Yes I suppose in this case I was lucky and didnt get the storage sleeve - so sorry I can't say how to remove it.

And thank you for confirming. Out of the box, for whatever reason even though the WD passport is formatted Fat32 it doesn't work.

Of course XP won't let you format something that large so yes you have find another means. Mine was fat32format.exe... I learned this from another 'hobby' (FTA's), here's a cut and paste from there - its easier than it sounds!

Now download a copy of fat32format. Extract the single EXE file to somewhere suitable, like C:\. Click Start->Run and enter cmd. CD to the where you extracted the fat32format exe, e.g. by typing CD /D c:\
Now you're almost done.
Type this
fat32format f:
You should see this displayed
Warning ALL data on drive 'f' will be lost irretrievably, are you sure (y/n)
Now when it says this, it really means it. If you format the boot sector, FATs and root directory will be filled with zeros. By typing pressing Y and hitting return, you're also absolving me of liability for whatever was on the disk before.

Assuming you don't bail out at this point you should see something like this -
Warning ALL data on drive 'f' will be lost irretrievably, are you sure
(y/n) :y
Size : 250GB 488392002 sectors
512 Bytes Per Sector, Cluster size 32768 bytes
Volume ID is 1bdb:2c1d
32 Reserved Sectors, 59604 Sectors per FAT, 2 fats
7629261 Total clusters
7629260 Free Clusters
Formatting drive f:...
Clearing out 119304 sectors for Reserved sectors, fats and root cluster...
Wrote 61083648 bytes in 0.988463 seconds, 61796609.106193 bytes/sec
Initialising reserved sectors and FATs...
Done
This means that all has gone according to plan. It should take about 4 seconds per Terabyte to format the disk. You can run chkdsk f: at this point if you're curious, and see something like this -
The type of the file system is FAT32.
Volume Serial Number is 1BDB-2C1D
Windows is verifying files and folders...
File and folder verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
244,136,352 KB total disk space.
244,136,320 KB are available.



After you're done use XP to name/rename the drive (my computer, drive properties). *** make sure you have a name for the drive regardless - my first attempt it kept the name 'Western' but all of a sudden 6FL decided it was something like 1DOE1C and when I hooked it up to a PC sure enough there was no name attached to it - named it as per above and all's been good. Western was the name prior to formating it and when 6FL didnt see Western anymore it started to index it over again.

Also a tip for indexing. 6FL seems to remember the drive name (in my case MY MUSIC). and it appears that if you add or more specifically remove files or folders 6FL doesnt seem to take notice, at least over a short period of time. I was playing with playlist formats etc and noticed all my attempts were still showing in 6FL even though they were deleted off the drive.

Anyway, if you ever want to 'start over' and re-index a drive just change the name and 6FL should just start over.

[alistair]

This is a great post - thanks!

Modern hard-drives are pretty sturdy - but this is a cheaper solution, if it gets toasted it can be replaced (from a backup!).

The primary reason for iPods' "skip protection" now is actually battery usage. It uses a lot of power (relatively) to keep the hard-drive spinning, whereas memory uses very little. iPod loads the current and next track into memory, and shuts down the drive. This is why, if you listen hard, and you skip a lot of tracks you'll hear the drive spin up as it loads the next one.

When the hard drive stops spinning, the heads (the primary moving part that causes damage) are "parked" so that they don't jolt. This is an added marketing bonus on late model iPods, but only really of value with old drives.

The likelihood is that you won't go over a bump hard enough to damage your drive - and if you did, it's pretty certain it also toasted your tire, rim, or tracking.

The only disadvantages I can see here are:

1. Can't play DRM music (if that matters)
2. More challenging playlist management (can't use iTunes to do it)
3. Maybe harder to add new music (a little?)

[100mph]

Originally Posted by agalbraith

The only disadvantages I can see here are:

1. Can't play DRM music (if that matters)
2. More challenging playlist management (can't use iTunes to do it)
3. Maybe harder to add new music (a little?)

1. Not sure about DRM music - I avoid it!

2. Can't use Itunes but I just dragged and dropped my 'playlist' into Winamp (free) and saved as M3U and when dragged from the WD it seems to be formatted properly (no need to edit as I posted earlier)

3. Actually its not, at least if you just add a new folder of music - I added about 1GB of music in a new folder and it took about 5 minutes for 6FL to 'update' the index.

[drwtsn32]

Originally Posted by 100mph

Actually its not, at least if you just add a new folder of music - I added about 1GB of music in a new folder and it took about 5 minutes for 6FL to 'update' the index.

So it "saw" the new music in about 5 minutes...and this is without changing the volume label?

[100mph]

Originally Posted by drwtsn32

So it "saw" the new music in about 5 minutes...and this is without changing the volume label?

Yes that was without changing the volume label - I assume had I changed the volume label it would have taken an hour or so again to re-index the whole drive.

I really wish BMW had some info on this - I'm using the term 'index' but have no way of knowing what exactly 6FL is doing other than my trial and error experimenting.

It seems to know if you add folders, haven't tried adding files to existing folders though