Hi There,

I've been using a 250gb usb powered La Cie 2.5" hard drive.
It was working fine with about 2gb of songs. Yesterday, I dumped all my 200gb of music into it, and it is no longer working.
The USB interface recognizes the drive's name and stays in "loading" mode for about 20 minutes, after which it stops without making any songs available.
What is the maximum amount of songs you have been able to put in an external hard drive (working properly)?
Any advices on how to go around this issue?

Best Regards,
Joao

It sounds like you might be hitting some limitation of the car's memory (for holding the index). The only other thing I'd suggest is to try using the "triple mute" trick. On my car, it seems as if I press the mute button (volume knob) three times while the "loading" screen is displayed, I'm able to play the songs right away instead of waiting a few minutes.

If that trick doesn't help, I think you ought to do some testing with different amounts of data on the drive to see where it breaks. The issue is probably not one of how many megabytes, it's probably more related to how many actual songs, etc.

I've got a 16Gb memory stick, I loaded more songs on to it today. Twice today whilst in the middle of a song (different songs, which have played ok before and after) it jumps back to FM1 and then shows the USB option greyed out. I have to remove the stick and put it back in, then its ok again. MEH.

The manual states "The information of up to four USB devices can be stored in the vehicle, for a total of approx. 20,000 tracks."

I am using almost fully populated 120GB drive with about 15,000 tracks and no problems except for the first day.
I use the file structure (built from the tags) rather than the tags to navigate.

The total of 20,000 tracks might be partitioned as 5000 per device. What you might want to try is renaming the drive's volume and letting the car reindex it as if it's a new device. You might even want to try doing that a few times to flush the old memory.

I have no idea if this will help you out, I'm just taking a stab at it for now. I think you're the first person to try such a large drive with so many songs... :cool:

Thanks Rudy for your advice.
I've brought down the amount of songs to 170gb and it is now able to navigate folders and play all the songs.
It is still not able to build an index with "artist/album/genre/etc".
I've created alphabetic artist folders to speed up the access to songs and it is convenient enough.

I still wonder up to what amount of info, the computer will be able to build the index! The benchmark is now on 16 gb, right?

Cheers,
Joao

How long have you waited for it to index the songs? Sometimes it can take a while -- especially the first time the drive is connected...

Never longer than 10 min. The car is only 400 km...
By the way, it is also playing files with 320 kbs without any problems!