KDC-MP538U hdd size

[mcmartinez84]

I'm new to this forum as well as to car stereos. Up until very recently, all I had was the stock tape/radio deck in my 94 Camry. One of my car savvy friends helped me install a KDC-MP538U to modernize my car just a bit.

Now, I'm pretty happy with it except that it doesn't play well with hard drives. So far my 4 GB flash drive has been working just peachy, but not so much with my portable (USB powered) hard drives.

I've got a 320 GB drive that I formatted multiple times (and ways) to FAT32 (from NTFS), put some music right in the root to see if the stereo would read it, but to no avail, it says "No Device" and switches over to the radio.

I have a 400 GB drive that I also tried...still no luck. So I used a GParted Live disc and formatted a FAT32 ~60 GB partition. I put a few folders with music in them in addition to putting some files in the root and it worked. This was, however, just a few folders with about 1 GB of data. Once this worked, I proceeded to add on a lot more music. Now that I'm up to ~11 gigs of music (out of my ~100 GB collection), the stereo says "Reading" for a few seconds and then just switches to the tuner.

I've tried reading the manual and I can't find any documentation on limits for the size of hard drives that the stereo can read and play from. The only limits are the # of folders and whatnot. I'm certain that I'm well under the limit.

One of my friends has the same stereo (unfortunately doesn't live anywhere near I do). He's had trouble with a 120 GB drive, but his 60 GB drive seems to work. I thought partitioning would do the trick, and it did work better than just the one partition of 320 or 400 GB. Still not satisfactory if I can only use a couple of gigs on a massive drive.

Should I just be using a smaller hard drive? Why won't the partition work when I have more files on it, but it does with just a few files? It's terribly confusing that it only works some of the time.

If anyone at all has some words of wisdom, I'll be eternally grateful.

Thank you in advance.

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[wu501 10+ year member]

I would go with a smaller portable drive. I ran a portable 40gb drive with my kenwood with no problems whatsoever.

 

[wu501 10+ year member]

the larger portable drives may require more usb power than the head unit can supply.

 

[mcmartinez84]

Thanks for the info.

What bothers me the most about this is the fact that there's really no documentation. Why can't Kenwood tell me what the hardware can do? I honestly would have just spent more money on another unit if I had known I was going to run into this problem.

I guess my next question is...has anyone been able to use a 100+ GB hard drive successfully with any after market stereo?

 

[wu501 10+ year member]

the kenwood is actually the best and fastest usb capable head unit I have used. And you can use a larger drive as long as it is within the power limits.

 

[wu501 10+ year member]

The kenwood has 500ma max current supply so if your drive requires more current it is not going to function properly.

 

[wu501 10+ year member]

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