Head Units and External Hard Drives

[jerryrobinson 10+ year member]

no one said anything about my clarion 575usb. that has no problems what so ever using the usb with any size hard drive

 

[niceguy01gt]

is there any updates on the Kenwood Excelon KDC-X991, any one get one yet now that its out and the prices very from 375 - 650. it sounds like and amazing HU. but how well does it really work. and whats the largest HDD you've got hooked up to it, and does it pick up where you left off on your Play list

 

[scals37 10+ year member]

is there any updates on the Kenwood Excelon KDC-X991, any one get one yet now that its out and the prices very from 375 - 650. it sounds like and amazing HU. but how well does it really work. and whats the largest HDD you've got hooked up to it, and does it pick up where you left off on your Play list

bump...

 

[dwc 10+ year member]

I installed my 690UB, and hooked the 4" usb tail into the shortest usb cord I have, which is all of about six inches. It's so short that the cord doesnt really make it all the way from the HU to the glovebox.

UNfortunately the Iomega 120GB 4200 RPM silver series portable HD will not initalize. This is a big disappointment at this stage, as the leads are very short and I bought the 4500rpm drive specifically because I expected it to need less current than the newer 7200 rpm drives.

Now I am contemplating sending the drive back and trying some other drive, or trying to wire in a USB power source and use the Y cable.

This is the drive I used

I am open to all advice.

Thanks,

Dsn

 

[niceguy01gt]

ok so there is still a problem with the portable hard drives, has anyone hooked up a power inverter and used a externial hard drive, and if so, will your play list pick up where it left off? i am still reading up on all the diffrent HUs and the X991 is still looking really good for what i am wanting out of a head unit. i live in manhattan, KS and this kinda stuff isn't really all the big and the local shops aren't much help. i have also been checkin out way to build a cheap car PC but that always ends up goin way out of my desired budget. as far as hard drives go i am looking at goin with a 300gig seeing how i have 261gigs of mp3s and still adding to the collection, my take another two years or so before i fill the 300. there just isn't a flash drive that large nor is there an mp3 player that large and at that the 180gig i-pod is goin for 350 and thats near the price of the HU, tack on another 150 for a 300gig HDD money well spent but its the constent mad serch for a HU that will work

 

[mightymavkev]

Hello everyone. I was searching around for similar external hard drive information on in dash dvd/nav units and stumbled onto this thread.

I have the Pioneer P6900UB that is referenced here. I have gone through ALOT of experimenting and I can report my findings to you if it helps.

I am successfully using a 120G hard drive. I buy the Toshiba drives (MK1234GAX) from EWIZ.com.

I have tried the Passport from WD and it flat out does not work. I'm not sure if the cable is the problem since the pioneer has a 3 foot cable (or maybe 4) hard wired to the back. But I definitely could not get it to work.

I originally used a coolmax enclosure. Also bought it at EWIZ.com. Model number is Coolmax HD-211-U2. The interesting thing about this enclosure is the connector is not the mini. It is the standard size USB female connection (I guess type A is what is called). The cable that comes with it is a Y-Cable with a lead intended for power only. However, with the Toshiba drive - formatted to FAT32 using Swissknife, I didn't need an external power source with the Pioneer HU.

After several months I began to have problems with the drive. I thought the drive was bad but worked fine on the PC and elsewhere. Then figured the enclosure or the enclosure's motherboard was going bad. Actually bought another and tried that and still got hit or miss results. The main problem I was having was intermittent "No Device" errors.

I thought the connection itself was weak to the USB cable so I built up the the male tip on the cable with some electrical tape to make it a tighter fit. That seemed to help, but still problems.

I finally figured out what it was. It came down to power. Apparently, even though the drive "technically" was within the 500mA limit, when it needed to spin alot, it seemed to exceed the HU's ability to supply power.

I connected a cig lighter power connection to the other lead on the Y cable and the problem was solved.

Throughout all of this I tried multiple enclosures and never found any to wook except this coolmax model and one other. The other enclosure that worked for me uses a A-B cable like most other enclosures and external drives we're used to seeing out there. It is an InfoSafe. It was 29.99 at Microcenter here in Cincinnati. The big difference with this enclosure is that it comes with a small box that takes 4 AA batteries and a power plug that you can use to power the device with running a cig ligher cable. Of course, you have to remember to turn it off or it will run the batteries out , but a nice feature if you don't want the extra cables or are using the cig lighter for something else.

Anyway, if you are having problems with your drives and you are positive it is formatted completely from scratch (due a full or "long" format - not the quick one!!!!!!), try using an enclosure like I have described with external power.

If you have a WD Passport, good luck. Never could get that one to work.

Now, for capacity, file structure issues, and playlists.........

As I mentioned above, I have a 120G drive. It is basically full of music. What I discovered was alot of unwritten rules regarding the file structure that no one will tell you - especially Pioneer.

I'm still not 100% sure what the exact number is, but you WILL run into a limit on the either the number of directories or the number of files or a combination of both before you have any problem with the physical size of your drive.

The Pioneer reads the directory and file structure before it starts to play. The more directories and files you have (especially levels) the longer it takes to read all of it into memory. I originally had my music in a hierarchy organized by Artist\Album\song.mp3. At some point when moving my music over, the HU was just simply unable to read it all in and it just hung up on the "reading format" message or whatever it is. I read somewhere (can't remember what forum it was now) that there was some sort of limit on directories that it could handle in the file structure. I decided to reorganize my music to see if I could get it to work.

So I changed my directory structure to be Artist\song.mp3 and I renamed all my song file names to include the album name before the song title. This drastically cut down on the number of actual directories on my drive and the Pioneer immediately was able to cope again. The other added benefit I achieved from this is now I can play randomly in shuffle mode all songs by a single artist since the songs are actually in the Artist directory now instead of an Album directory (random play by folder is only within the folder the songs are in - not higher folders in the hierarchy).

So I'm happy now and my unit is working fine.

UNTIL.......

the next problem. Once I started getting enough songs on the drive to cross over 100G, I started getting a different problem. All of a sudden, the songs in the last few directories I had in the structure were gone.

Well, they weren't really gone, but the player suddenly "lost" them, even though they were still there - and fine - and readable on my computer.

I added more files and cofirmed that the point at which the files were "lost" moved up the alphabetical director list proportional to the number of files I added. (for example, when it first lost all the ZZ-Top files, and then I added more, it then lost all the Whitesnake files as well as the ZZ-Top files and so on.

Obviously, I had reached some unwritten "number of files" limit that I didnt' know existed. I still don't know what that exact number is nor do I know if it is impacted at all by the size of the drive or the number of directories in the structure, but I do know it is definitely there. I removed some artists I could afford to sacrifice and voila!, Whitesnake and ZZ-Top were back - just like magic.

So, problem number 2. After you realize your directory structure has to be minimized as much as you can realistically tolerate , you will eventually reach a hard limit on the number of files you can have and have to cut back anyway.

As I said, it may support a 250G drive, but it won't support 250G worth of MP3 files at least not from what I can tell.

Finally, playlists.

Playlists (.m3u) will work but only if they are ABOVE the directory structure that the referenced song files are in. Basically, that means put the playlist file in the root directory.

I wanted to put my playlists in a PLAYLISTS directory off of root, but unless I also put my entire music collection under PLAYLISTS also, it basically made them siblings in the same hierarchy and the Pioneer is apparently not capable of following reference to a file that requires moving back up a directory level first and then back down. In other words, C:\PLAYLIST\rock.m3u cannot reference C:\ACDC\for_those_about_to_rock.mp3. Because once it is in the PLAYLIST directory it cannot go back up to the root directory and back down into ACDC.

So, the only way I could get Playlists to work is to actually put the playlist file itself in the root directory and not have a PLAYLIST directory at all. So obviously, this means that your playlists names are then intermixed alphabetically with your music directories - so you'll have to name all you playlists starting with a number or something to get them at the top or together to find them easy.

BTW, when I called Pioneer on the playlist issue, they told me flat out that the Pioneer would not support playlist files. Even though manual says it will.

Finally, and I apologize for this being so long, one last thing on playlists. Random play does not work when playing a playlist on the Pioneer. IF you want to create a playlist but not have it played in song sequence, you will have to build it randomized in the first place (which is pretty easy to do in WinAmp). But it will always play in that order so if it has hundreds of songs in it, you'll get sick of the first few pretty fast.

Anyway, I hope this helps any Pioneer 6900UB owners out there. Sorry it is so long, but I did alot of testing to find this stuff out so sounded like it might be of use from reading the thread.

Thanks,

Kevin

Cincinnati, Ohio

 

[Famous_78]

Hello everyone. I was searching around for similar external hard drive information on in dash dvd/nav units and stumbled onto this thread.
I have the Pioneer P6900UB that is referenced here. I have gone through ALOT of experimenting and I can report my findings to you if it helps.

I am successfully using a 120G hard drive. I buy the Toshiba drives (MK1234GAX) from EWIZ.com.

I have tried the Passport from WD and it flat out does not work. I'm not sure if the cable is the problem since the pioneer has a 3 foot cable (or maybe 4) hard wired to the back. But I definitely could not get it to work.

I originally used a coolmax enclosure. Also bought it at EWIZ.com. Model number is Coolmax HD-211-U2. The interesting thing about this enclosure is the connector is not the mini. It is the standard size USB female connection (I guess type A is what is called). The cable that comes with it is a Y-Cable with a lead intended for power only. However, with the Toshiba drive - formatted to FAT32 using Swissknife, I didn't need an external power source with the Pioneer HU.

After several months I began to have problems with the drive. I thought the drive was bad but worked fine on the PC and elsewhere. Then figured the enclosure or the enclosure's motherboard was going bad. Actually bought another and tried that and still got hit or miss results. The main problem I was having was intermittent "No Device" errors.

I thought the connection itself was weak to the USB cable so I built up the the male tip on the cable with some electrical tape to make it a tighter fit. That seemed to help, but still problems.

I finally figured out what it was. It came down to power. Apparently, even though the drive "technically" was within the 500mA limit, when it needed to spin alot, it seemed to exceed the HU's ability to supply power.

I connected a cig lighter power connection to the other lead on the Y cable and the problem was solved.

Throughout all of this I tried multiple enclosures and never found any to wook except this coolmax model and one other. The other enclosure that worked for me uses a A-B cable like most other enclosures and external drives we're used to seeing out there. It is an InfoSafe. It was 29.99 at Microcenter here in Cincinnati. The big difference with this enclosure is that it comes with a small box that takes 4 AA batteries and a power plug that you can use to power the device with running a cig ligher cable. Of course, you have to remember to turn it off or it will run the batteries out , but a nice feature if you don't want the extra cables or are using the cig lighter for something else.

Anyway, if you are having problems with your drives and you are positive it is formatted completely from scratch (due a full or "long" format - not the quick one!!!!!!), try using an enclosure like I have described with external power.

If you have a WD Passport, good luck. Never could get that one to work.

Now, for capacity, file structure issues, and playlists.........

As I mentioned above, I have a 120G drive. It is basically full of music. What I discovered was alot of unwritten rules regarding the file structure that no one will tell you - especially Pioneer.

I'm still not 100% sure what the exact number is, but you WILL run into a limit on the either the number of directories or the number of files or a combination of both before you have any problem with the physical size of your drive.

The Pioneer reads the directory and file structure before it starts to play. The more directories and files you have (especially levels) the longer it takes to read all of it into memory. I originally had my music in a hierarchy organized by Artist\Album\song.mp3. At some point when moving my music over, the HU was just simply unable to read it all in and it just hung up on the "reading format" message or whatever it is. I read somewhere (can't remember what forum it was now) that there was some sort of limit on directories that it could handle in the file structure. I decided to reorganize my music to see if I could get it to work.

So I changed my directory structure to be Artist\song.mp3 and I renamed all my song file names to include the album name before the song title. This drastically cut down on the number of actual directories on my drive and the Pioneer immediately was able to cope again. The other added benefit I achieved from this is now I can play randomly in shuffle mode all songs by a single artist since the songs are actually in the Artist directory now instead of an Album directory (random play by folder is only within the folder the songs are in - not higher folders in the hierarchy).

So I'm happy now and my unit is working fine.

UNTIL.......

the next problem. Once I started getting enough songs on the drive to cross over 100G, I started getting a different problem. All of a sudden, the songs in the last few directories I had in the structure were gone.

Well, they weren't really gone, but the player suddenly "lost" them, even though they were still there - and fine - and readable on my computer.

I added more files and cofirmed that the point at which the files were "lost" moved up the alphabetical director list proportional to the number of files I added. (for example, when it first lost all the ZZ-Top files, and then I added more, it then lost all the Whitesnake files as well as the ZZ-Top files and so on.

Obviously, I had reached some unwritten "number of files" limit that I didnt' know existed. I still don't know what that exact number is nor do I know if it is impacted at all by the size of the drive or the number of directories in the structure, but I do know it is definitely there. I removed some artists I could afford to sacrifice and voila!, Whitesnake and ZZ-Top were back - just like magic.

So, problem number 2. After you realize your directory structure has to be minimized as much as you can realistically tolerate , you will eventually reach a hard limit on the number of files you can have and have to cut back anyway.

As I said, it may support a 250G drive, but it won't support 250G worth of MP3 files at least not from what I can tell.

Finally, playlists.

Playlists (.m3u) will work but only if they are ABOVE the directory structure that the referenced song files are in. Basically, that means put the playlist file in the root directory.

I wanted to put my playlists in a PLAYLISTS directory off of root, but unless I also put my entire music collection under PLAYLISTS also, it basically made them siblings in the same hierarchy and the Pioneer is apparently not capable of following reference to a file that requires moving back up a directory level first and then back down. In other words, C:\PLAYLIST\rock.m3u cannot reference C:\ACDC\for_those_about_to_rock.mp3. Because once it is in the PLAYLIST directory it cannot go back up to the root directory and back down into ACDC.

So, the only way I could get Playlists to work is to actually put the playlist file itself in the root directory and not have a PLAYLIST directory at all. So obviously, this means that your playlists names are then intermixed alphabetically with your music directories - so you'll have to name all you playlists starting with a number or something to get them at the top or together to find them easy.

BTW, when I called Pioneer on the playlist issue, they told me flat out that the Pioneer would not support playlist files. Even though manual says it will.

Finally, and I apologize for this being so long, one last thing on playlists. Random play does not work when playing a playlist on the Pioneer. IF you want to create a playlist but not have it played in song sequence, you will have to build it randomized in the first place (which is pretty easy to do in WinAmp). But it will always play in that order so if it has hundreds of songs in it, you'll get sick of the first few pretty fast.

Anyway, I hope this helps any Pioneer 6900UB owners out there. Sorry it is so long, but I did alot of testing to find this stuff out so sounded like it might be of use from reading the thread.

Thanks,

Kevin

Cincinnati, Ohio

Thats a *****in first post.

 

[Bumpin'Buick 10+ year member]

no one said anything about my clarion 575usb. that has no problems what so ever using the usb with any size hard drive

What's the biggest size HD you've used?

I have a 775usb and have only been using USB flash drives so far.

 

[mightymavkev]

Thats a *****in first post.

Yeah. First post. Sorry it was so long, but the more I explained the more I remembered and so on....

I'm looking for another head unit that will not be limited like my pioneer is. When I saw all the posts about that unit, I thought I'd share my experiences.

 

[rvpps2rocks 10+ year member]

After reading the whole thread im thinking of geting the 6900 but was just curious how many lines can you see at once when browsing the external HD. And i was also thinking of getting the 4000ub cuz its a lil cheaper and more in my price range. What do you guys think

 

[rvpps2rocks 10+ year member]

i see the the 6900 is discontinued so what would be the new replacement for it?

 

[kidwolf909 10+ year member]

I have the 6900UB right now as well and my WD Passport 80GB hooked right up to it and worked perfectly. It's a 5400rpm drive and it's the older, less power-thrifty models of the Passports. Just make sure you plug the drive's pigtail straight into the lead coming off the back of the unit. More than 2 ft of USB cable will not allow the drive enough power to spin up.

The 6000UB is the replacement for the 6900UB.

 

[Kai Winters 10+ year member]

That is a great first post mightymavkev.

I have an Alpine iDA-X001. I am able to use my WD Passport 160gb hdd via the usb port as well as a PNY Attache Optima...high speed...flash drive. My old JVC KD AR770 hu would not play either the flash drive or passport.

I do have a question regarding your file format for those of you using external usb hard drives like my passport. What file format are you using? My Alpine owners manual says it will read only FAT8/16/32 and I always use NTFS on my computer. I reformatted the passport to FAT32 but had to create partitions as WinXP Pro would not format the 160gb passport. Advice and suggestions are appreciated.

The Passport came formatted as FAT32 but I reformatted to NTFS not expecting to use it in my car but that was before I bought the Alpine.

 

[lillitnn92 10+ year member]

I reformatted the passport to FAT32 but had to create partitions as WinXP Pro would not format the 160gb passport. Advice and suggestions are appreciated.

try using this program that i mentioned on previous page. it will allow you to format the whole drive in FAT32 and not in different partitions.

http://www.compuapps.com/download/Swissknife/swissknife.htm

 

[Kai Winters 10+ year member]

Thanks for the info lillitnn92.

I found the software on the WD site. They have a nifty little program that reformats the passport back to its' factory FAT32 format.

I have reformatted it and hope to get all my files on it and tested during the wknd.