Looking at one of the new Alpine media head units with the USB inputs. Can I plug in a 250 gig mobile hard drive and play music from that?

Not interested in an iPOD solution...want to use a portable hard drive.

Thanks,

Lawrence

 

should be able to all depends how much media it can handle maybe 250gb is too much maybe not lol my clarion deck does it just fine but i dont have a drive that big to it

i find its a great option good luck and enjoy

 

try it and let us know.

 

My bet is you'll be ok as long as you can format the drive using FAT32. XP will insist on NTFS for any partition > 32MB, so you'll need a third party utility, or Linux, or something else to format the drive.

 

Linux... Is there anything it can't do?

 

well according to the cda-9886 manual; "this unit can recognize at least 100 folders (including root folder) and 100 files per folder stored in usb memory". That means 10,000 tracks give or take. Unless you're storing all the files in wav format ( the unit mentions nothing about WAV playback capability), the 250 gigs seems a little large. I have a lot of WAV files on my IPOD, but the pod plays it and the signal is sent to the Alpine receiver. With the USB, the receiver would need to decode the info. Look into it further before you buy.

 

My pioneer can handle up to 250gb, try the alpine manual?

 

my brother has a usb deck, and he used to plug in large amounts of storage like that. it worked on his JVC deck, but the only bad thing about it was every time the deck is powered on, it looks through all of the music to see what's there. with large drives (i think he only had 20 gigs too) this took a long time... like somewhere between 3-5 mins. basically he said **** it because it was really annoying to have to wait for the music to come on like that.

 

get a thumb drive i use 1g but you can get the 8gb instead or even the 2, 4,6 ,8,16 or 32 its nice and small too works great for usually you wouldnt have to wait everytime it should be able to recognize the drive when it opens unless he takes it out everytime

 

575usb im sure it can handle 250gb hard drive but they have song limits soo if you use lossless compresion use the 250gb if you just download off the net (128 to 320) 8gb thumbdrive can handle thousands of of songs