external harddisk on blue & me

[ViperJedi]

hello,

one more week till i become a fiat driver too, will be getting my fiat punto evo racing

I have a question to which i havent found the answer yet. The garage hasnt been able to help me to an answer either.

The punto has the Blue&me with the usb-port.
I am thinking of connecting a portable harddisk onto it. (one which is powered by the usb-cable)

With that, i have 2 questions.
1. Does the usb-port give enough power-output to power a portable hd through the usb-connection?

2. What is the maximal capacity the blue&me can handle. I was thinking about getting a 500 or 1000 gb harddisk

Is there anyone who already has a semilar setup in their car?

Thanx in advance for your answers/help!

 

[Blank2k2]

hello,

one more week till i become a fiat driver too, will be getting my fiat punto evo racing

I have a question to which i havent found the answer yet. The garage hasnt been able to help me to an answer either.

The punto has the Blue&me with the usb-port.
I am thinking of connecting a portable harddisk onto it. (one which is powered by the usb-cable)

With that, i have 2 questions.
1. Does the usb-port give enough power-output to power a portable hd through the usb-connection?

2. What is the maximal capacity the blue&me can handle. I was thinking about getting a 500 or 1000 gb harddisk

Is there anyone who already has a semilar setup in their car?

Thanx in advance for your answers/help!

Punto Evo Sporting?

I've not got an external hdd in my car, but im pretty sure i read somewhere Blue&Me struggles with 16gb+ memory sticks?... so a HDD would be overkill

And personally, using the Blue&Me system in my Evo, the Blue&Me album navigation etc really isnt good enough to warrant any serious bulks of music, just takes too long to find what your looking for... its great for a memory stick & a few albums etc and so far in my experience it doesn't do voice control for the media player in the sense that "Play Michael Jackson" would work, just play/stop/next/previous......if im wrong someone feel free to correct me, ive just not had voice control work when ive tried that..... I reallllllly hope its something they add in a future update, if they did i'd definitely look into bigger memory.

So a terabyte of music you'd slam into the central reservation, been cut outt of the car, taken to hospital, died, and be half way through the funeral service before you found the song you were looking for.

 

[Hellcat]

Right, a couple of questions there so here is a brief FAQ on the blue&me and external drives.

The blue&me USB port typically does not provide enough power to run an external drive. If your external drive has a 2nd USB port for power as most do, you can connect this through a 12v to USB connector such as the Belkin one.



Blue&me reads FAT32, and maybe FAT format only. If you're running windows XP or later you will be limited to formatting FAT32 on disks (and USB stick drives) upto 32GB. After that it will default to NTFS and FAT32 will be disabled.

You can still format drives over 32GB but you will need to use a 3rd party application such as FAT 32 Formatter. You can get that application here

http://tokiwa.qee.jp/EN/Fat32Formatter/

Consider that FAT32 is not the most efficient method to format large disks so try not to go too crazy as the partition table will be getting quite large. 80GB is a good limit - and gives you more storage than a standard ipod - i.e. days worth of MP3s.

Now how to browse your thousands of MP3s? You can either shuffle through them one by one or do as I have and organise them in folders.

Press the blue&me button on the steering wheel and say "Folders" and a list of folders will appear on the drivers display behind the steering wheel. Scroll through with up and down buttons and ok to select. Then you get a list of all the tracks in that folder with the option 'play all' at the top.

So to sumarise, blue&me works fine with external drives

 

[ViperJedi]

thanks you both for your answers.
I know a usb-stick might be easier, but looking at the price-ratio, it is cheaper to go for a external harddisk (price per gigabites). That is what got me thinking about a hd.
Plus, the idea was to have a load of mp3's and never have to listen to the same song twice hehe.

I will be getting my car saturday, then i will test some things.
I will post my findings here



i think i might be placing another post, since i am not sure if my blackberry 8520 (the newest curve) is supported lol. But will give it a try first.

cheers!

 

[ViperJedi]

ok, a quick update.
i have found out you can format a hd of every size with FAT32. The only limitation is that you can only put files onto the disk with a size of maximal 4 gb. But with mp3´s, this shouldnt be a problem.

The real problem lies in finding a harddisk that doesnt need much power. Most portable hd´s need an extra powersupply. Most use 2usb-ports for that.
I have bought a 32 gb usb-stick. These dont use a lot of power, are relative cheap and can hold a lot of mp3´s.
I ripped all my cd´s and its still not full haha.

Grtz Peter

 

[shadgrind]

I am going to try using a 250 gig WD HDD with a Y USB cable to draw power from another USB socket plugged into 12v socket. Data to be fed from the drive to the B&M port and power from the 12v socket....

 

[rangdo]

Thankfully my wife isn't too fussy on the amount of music she needs in her 500 (when she eventually gets it) so I've got a few USB sticks kicking around that should be fine.

However I've just gone through exactly the same process in my 318 so here are some considerations/findings I've gone through.

External HDD powered by USB only - ideally you'd want slow spinning ones, 3600rpm or maybe 4200. These are getting harder to come by though. Extremes of temperature in the car and possibility of physical shocks could affect reliability.

Using a y-cable, should be fine as most of the juice drawn by the disk is when spinning up. However, when you turn the ignition off the secondary power shuts off whilst the USB socket would still be live. So you might lose your music while sat in the car parked up

I thought about big memory sticks (I wanted 120-ish GB) but they're slow to write (for loading up music), not always quick to read and there can be reliability/quality issues.

My personal solution, while not the cheapest, was to get a 120GB solid state disk. There were still issues with power requirements as the first one I tried was a Crucial C300, took that back and got a Corsair F120 and that's been working perfectly for 3 weeks now Access is quicker than a memory stick too, so navigation is quite nippy. And there are no problems with knocks, bangs, etc.

 

[shadgrind]

I am going to try using a 250 gig WD HDD with a Y USB cable to draw power from another USB socket plugged into 12v socket. Data to be fed from the drive to the B&M port and power from the 12v socket....

Well I did it, with a modicum of success. It will do a 'Play Anything' but folders dont seem to work, just says 'please wait updating' for a few seconds then goes back to what it was doing. I may try setting up some playlists to see if that gets around the problem...

 

[Marcos999]

depending on how much music is on there you may have to give it a while as it needs to update the library. I've recently discovered the B&M Tomtom is handy when you have a lot of music as it makes browsing and selecting music easier.