Music storage

Discussion in 'Car Audio Head Units' started by Klinkster, Sep 25, 2010.

  1. Ranger SVO

    Ranger SVO Full Member

    I have had a few customers use hard drives in there cars with no problem. So until I see a problem, I'm gonna assume your wrong.

    I also have a friend with a car computer in his wife Mitsu Eclipse with a sport tuned suspension. This thing rides rough. I'll let him know the hard drive will fail any minute now. Can you tell me when this will happen? It will have been in the car for 2 years in November.
     
  2. Klinkster

    Klinkster Full Member

    Hehe, its only a $25 gamble. I know how sensitve HDDs are as I've built quite a few PCs as a hobby. Yes its mechanical not digital like a jump drive is, but I'd thought I'd give it a shot and see how it goes. I'm not going to mount it to anything either. It will be sitting on top of my owners manual in the glove box, so that should give it a little extra cushion as well.
     
  3. TE5LA

    TE5LA Guest

    Sounds great.

    I remember when the first auto CD players came out and everyone assumed you needed to brace them very solidly to keep them from skipping, which of course made it worse.
     
  4. Klinkster

    Klinkster Full Member

    Great news!

    I finally got around to testing out my HDD with my Pioneer FHP 8000BT HU. I was prepared to have to wire up a additional USB port for the extra juice my HDD would probably need. I disconnected my usb drive and for the hell of it, I plugged in my new HDD into the cable. It fired right up! I'm guessing my new HDD isn't a power pig and that my HU's USB port has enough juice for it! :)

    Another great thing is its not really that much slower accessing my songs than the thumbdrive I was using. It might take about 30 seconds to start playing a song when I start my car. I saw a 1/2 second lag ONCE when I was scrolling through the artists(I have about 100 files), but it was brief and I only saw it once so far. Songs changes are quick as changing them on a CD.

    Now my only concern is life the HDD itself which only time will tell. I have it "floating" on a bed of maps and soft cover manuals in my glove box. I don't drive off road so I'm hoping that should be sufficient.

    When I get a chance, I will post a vid of it in action ;)
     
  5. Ranger SVO

    Ranger SVO Full Member

    I think the hard drive will be fine. Again, I've done this in a few cars with no problem. I just think its odd that my WD drive won't work in my Pioneer FH P8000BT but it will work on my sons Pioneer DEH P6000UB.

    Any way keep us all posted
     
  6. 07gmc

    07gmc Full Member

    lol.......guess I have been "out of it" too long!!!! The things you can do with car audio now just blows my mind!
     
  7. gba88

    gba88 Full Member

    Has anyone explored the issue with how long it takes for head units to read these drives? I have a 120GB wd elements drive and my jvc head unit also takes about 30 seconds to start playing.

    I have removed any non mp3 files from the drive, and I've also tried eliminating folders and just putting a few hundred songs in the root directory. Neither of these actions caused a change in the 30 second read time.

    I have 2 other ideas: 1. partitioning the drive into smaller chunks (maybe make one just large enough to hold the amount of mp3s I currently have on it, and leave the other space unpartitioned), and 2. powering the drive with a separate wire that would provided the 5v necessary to run it.

    The problem is that I don't know where the bottleneck is...is it within the head unit reading the structure of the drive? Is the 30 seconds the amount of the time the drive needs to properly spin up? is the voltage draw on the head unit through the usb cable causing it? or?? Anyone look into this at all?
     
  8. Ranger SVO

    Ranger SVO Full Member

    I believe the problem is the HU. The HU is not a computer with a super fast processor, so it takes it a minute to figure out where everything is.

    But do that, partition the drive and let us know how it goes.
     
  9. ericj

    ericj Full Member

    I agree with Ranger about the processor speed (plus, I'd throw USB transfer rate limitations in there, too). Although it's not a HU, I have a 1TB hard drive connected to my Wii to play *ahem* media, and it takes about 30 seconds to start up, too.
     
    Last edited: Nov 14, 2010
  10. Klinkster

    Klinkster Full Member

    The initial 30 seconds on cold boot doesn't bother me at all. Once its "spun up" the changes are quick. My only complaint is the slight lag from scanning through the folders too quickly.
     
  11. gba88

    gba88 Full Member

    Hey guys,
    sorry for the delay, I didn't realize anyone replied to this! The drive is in my car at the moment, but yeah, I'll probably try the partitioning idea. It reads my 2gb flash drive though in about 15 seconds, so I'd tend to think anything larger than that will get to the default 30 second mark. I've read elsewhere on the net about larger flash drives taking longer to be read than smaller ( < 2GB ). I'll report any findings once I get around to doing this!
     
  12. gba88

    gba88 Full Member

    Hey guys,
    No luck! I made 4 2GB partitions, and it only read the first (only took about 10 seconds to read though!). I now have the drive partitioned as a 16GB drive and it reads in about 20 seconds. I think I'm going to stick to this configuration for a while because when I had 90GB on it, it was taking about 30 or 31 seconds to read and I also noticed some weird static glitches on certain mp3s. There would be a split second of static or white noise.... when played on my pc, the files were perfectly fine. They were not encoded weird or anything, and played perfectly fine from a flash drive on the head unit. The only conclusion was that it was something with the hard drive that was causing the effect. It was *always* in the same exact time position on the affected tracks, too! Now with it partitioned to 16GB, the exact same tracks play fine. Very strange. These were all the exact same mp3s btw, just copied back and forth, no re-encoding or anything.

    Edit: it reads the drive partitioned as 16GB in about 15 or 16 seconds, not 20!
     
    Last edited: Nov 28, 2010
  13. Ranger SVO

    Ranger SVO Full Member

    Thanks for the additional info, what happens if you partion the drive up to 32 GB. Will that effect the access time alot?

    I used an 80GB and the access time was between 25 and 30 seconds, but I never considered that a problem. I also never thought about partitioning the drive.
     
  14. Klinkster

    Klinkster Full Member

    Funny you mention this. I'm having a similar issue with certain MP3 as well. I've heard the white noise a couple times, but more often I hear a repeated verse (like a 10 second rewind) on quite a few songs. Its always at the same part of the song(file) too, usually around the last 30 seconds of a track. Weird....
     
  15. gba88

    gba88 Full Member

    No problem for the info! I decided to stick to 16GB because going from 30 seconds to 15 is awesome. I never thought it was a big deal either until I went from 30 to 15...it's so much nicer having it resume play before I leave the driveway rather than halfway down my road :) Put it this way....when it was 30 seconds, I definitely *noticed* it, now what it's half that, I hardly notice the delay.

    I'm pretty satisfied with my music library too as far as what all I can get on the 16GB. I might try the 32 at some point, but honestly, I wasn't worried about having that much music in the car. Maybe on a 5 hour trip or something it would be different, but still, 16GB of mp3s is a MASSIVE amount.

    I'm not worried about only using 16GB of a 120GB drive either.....you have to spend about $30 anyway to get a 16GB flash drive, and from what I've read you still have the wait time. Even my 2GB flash drive takes about 10 seconds to read.

    Klinkster: I haven't experienced this since I re-partitioned the drive. I've tried the same exact songs that were the same exact files throughout the whole process and now the effect is not present.

    The only idea that I have is that the HU was reading a bad or "sketchy" sector of the drive that is not present in the current partition. Since most operating systems rely on the BIOS to read the drive's master boot record and to record bad sectors, I'm thinking that the HU has no such luxury. I may be wrong, but it makes sense to me because it was always at the precise same moment of the affected track. So, in my mind ( :) ) I can picture a tiny dust particle on one of the platters that the head unit does not know about, then it reads the mp3 and converts the surface flaw to white noise.

    EDIT: I'm questioning my understanding of the HU reading the MBR...when I had several partitions, it only read the first one. I would say that the HU has *some* sort of way of reading the MBR to obtain the partition info (NTFS or FAT32), but possibly it doesn't understand the sector mapping? Of course it may be just an "on/off" type of thing in that, if it sees FAT32, it reads it, if it does not, then it reports it says "no disk" -or whatever the message is when you give it an NTFS partition.
     
    Last edited: Nov 29, 2010
  16. gba88

    gba88 Full Member

    Well, the split second static reared it's ugly head again! I'd REALLY like to know what is causing this!! It has to be something with the physical drive since the exact same files play fine from a flash drive.