Portable hard drive instead of flash drive?

[Skullz]

I tried that on the alpine cde 102 and it would not read it and the damn thing was so picky on what flash drives it would pick up and use was frustrating.

I have not tried it on my pioneer but have heard that the larger you go the slower they are to respond and load songs so i just got a few 4 gig sticks to keep in the car with the various tracks i listen to.

[SQMonte]

Well guys, today is the day. My Toshiba Canvio Basics 3.0 320gb drive showed up today. Based on the advice of Cablguy184, I first checked to make sure my drive was formatted in FAT32. FAIL! When I attempted to format it in FAT32 Windows would not give me the option, my only options were exFAT or NTFS. So I checked the owners manual and sure as shit, it states FAT12/16/32 as the file systems that will work. After doing a Google search I found that Windows will only format drives up to 32gb in FAT32. Not one to give up easy I was able to find a free program that will do it so I went ahead and did it and copied an album to the drive then went to the car to test it out............it worked!!!

Now that I know that will work, i'm gonna reformat the drive in exFAT just for shits and giggles to see if that works....brb.....exFAT was a no go so back to FAT32.

So yeah, a 320gb hard drive works like a charm on the Alpine CDA-117, just make sure it's formatted in FAT32. You can do it in DOS via the command prompt or you can download FAT32format and use it like I did. It's a Windows GUI program that will convert any drive to FAT32.

Time to transfer some music!

[Nobody23x]

So your saying you will actually listen to more than 32 gb of music in a week. I bet if you played it strait you couldn't do it in a month. All im saying is if the drive isn't solid state. It will be dead in a month. So how much money did you save? Flash drive will take more vibrations.

[SQMonte]

So your saying you will actually listen to more than 32 gb of music in a week. I bet if you played it strait you couldn't do it in a month. All im saying is if the drive isn't solid state. It will be dead in a month. So how much money did you save? Flash drive will take more vibrations.

Just curious....can you please post what I said that made you come to the conclusion that I will listen to more than 32gb of music in a week? I need my whole music collection at my fingertips, so having just a third of it on a flash drive at any given time just wouldn't work for me. I know and understand the fundamental difference between an SSD and the HD I got, and I am very aware of the issues that can arise from using a drive like this....this 320gb drive costed me $45 shipped, for that money I'd barely be able to get 64gb of flash storage. If it doesn't work out long term, no big loss, it's just $45. If it dies, cool, I guess I'll put Toshiba's 3 year warranty to use

[RCP Audio]

Im glad it worked man!!

[White Lightning]

Well guys, today is the day. My Toshiba Canvio Basics 3.0 320gb drive showed up today. Based on the advice of Cablguy184, I first checked to make sure my drive was formatted in FAT32. FAIL! When I attempted to format it in FAT32 Windows would not give me the option, my only options were exFAT or NTFS. So I checked the owners manual and sure as shit, it states FAT12/16/32 as the file systems that will work. After doing a Google search I found that Windows will only format drives up to 32gb in FAT32. Not one to give up easy I was able to find a free program that will do it so I went ahead and did it and copied an album to the drive then went to the car to test it out............it worked!!!

Now that I know that will work, i'm gonna reformat the drive in exFAT just for shits and giggles to see if that works....brb.....exFAT was a no go so back to FAT32.

So yeah, a 320gb hard drive works like a charm on the Alpine CDA-117, just make sure it's formatted in FAT32. You can do it in DOS via the command prompt or you can download FAT32format and use it like I did. It's a Windows GUI program that will convert any drive to FAT32.

Time to transfer some music!

Awesome !!! Glad it worked ... I have 3 partitions of FAT32 (96gb) on my drive ...

So your saying you will actually listen to more than 32 gb of music in a week. I bet if you played it strait you couldn't do it in a month. All im saying is if the drive isn't solid state. It will be dead in a month. So how much money did you save? Flash drive will take more vibrations.

Just curious....can you please post what I said that made you come to the conclusion that I will listen to more than 32gb of music in a week? I need my whole music collection at my fingertips, so having just a third of it on a flash drive at any given time just wouldn't work for me. I know and understand the fundamental difference between an SSD and the HD I got, and I am very aware of the issues that can arise from using a drive like this....this 320gb drive costed me $45 shipped, for that money I'd barely be able to get 64gb of flash storage. If it doesn't work out long term, no big loss, it's just $45. If it dies, cool, I guess I'll put Toshiba's 3 year warranty to use

I have my 3 partitions loaded down with audio and video ... will I listen to it all in one week?? Hell no, but its very nice to have it at my fingertips when needed ...

[SQMonte]

Exactly! Well, I've run into an issue.....I have over 10k songs but my deck is only recognizing a little over 250. I'm not sure if it's due to the folder structure or what but it looks like I've got some work to do to work it out. The cool thing though is that my deck banks songs in blocks of 1000 so access is just as fast as when using my ipod. As for file structure, the ipod folder I copied my music from is sorted by artist, with an album folder inside the artist folder and the actual songs inside the album folder. I wonder if I should make it to where the music is organized by albums instead that way the deck just looks one folder deep to find the songs. Randy, any ideas on that?

[SQMonte]

Well, i'm not sure where to go from here but this is what I did tonight....

Wiped the drive and made a couple of 32gb partitions....did a test where I transferred an album folder and an artist folder, with an album folder in it with the songs in the album folder; I wanted to see if the deck would find the files both ways....it did. So I went ahead and transferred my collection and filled up both partitions. First problem is I can't tell what partition is being used so obviously can't pick which one I want to use. Second problem is that of the 9k+ songs, it's only recognizing about 1400. WTF???

Time to see if I can't talk to an Alpine Tech and get this figured out.....

[SQMonte]

Got it all worked out! When I open iTunes my music looks perfectly tagged, but when I opened the actual album folders that wasn't the case. So the problem is there are strict guidelines you have to stay within in order for the deck to read the music via usb...if your title is longer than 32 characters, deck won't recognize it...but that's not all, Albums and Artist names, etc., all have character limits on them too. So basically I had to fix the way my music is tagged so it fits those guidelines....I've only got about 3k of it done, got another 6k to go. Thank goodness for MP3tag, a batch tagging program, makes this process much faster and easier.

After my earlier fails I ended up wiping the drive and instead of 32gb partitions, I just made a single 128gb partition, FAT32....with my music tagged right not only does it load up and start playing music faster than when my iPod was connected but it also will pick up playing where it left off the last time it was plugged in. The banking thing takes a while but I can still listen to and change songs while it's doing it's thing so no big deal there. Just thought I'd share for those having issues along these lines.

[1996BLKBauer]

Got it all worked out! When I open iTunes my music looks perfectly tagged, but when I opened the actual album folders that wasn't the case. So the problem is there are strict guidelines you have to stay within in order for the deck to read the music via usb...if your title is longer than 32 characters, deck won't recognize it...but that's not all, Albums and Artist names, etc., all have character limits on them too. So basically I had to fix the way my music is tagged so it fits those guidelines....I've only got about 3k of it done, got another 6k to go. Thank goodness for MP3tag, a batch tagging program, makes this process much faster and easier.

After my earlier fails I ended up wiping the drive and instead of 32gb partitions, I just made a single 128gb partition, FAT32....with my music tagged right not only does it load up and start playing music faster than when my iPod was connected but it also will pick up playing where it left off the last time it was plugged in. The banking thing takes a while but I can still listen to and change songs while it's doing it's thing so no big deal there. Just thought I'd share for those having issues along these lines.

This is really awesome, because I wanted to get an external HDD and try the same thing. But I did not want to waste the extra money if it did not work. I am also glad it worked on you Alpine deck, I have a CDE-HD137BT, so hopefully a eternal HDD will work on it as well.