USB storage?

[paulfrank285]

sorry if this topic is duplicate; i can't really find the answer or may be i overlooked...

anyway, has anyone tried to connect a portable USB harddrive to MFT? i don't have my XLT yet but plan to use a portable USB harddrive mainly for mp3 files.

i understand that i can use USB flash drive but not sure if a portable USB harddrive will work (probably MFT limits the capacity to 32gb? 64 gb? etc)

thanks

 

[mwoods269]

Any usb device will work, flash drive or usb harddrive is all the same when viewed as storage. Some folks were complaining of MFT reindexing everytime the vehicle was turned off and of drives over 32GB giving issues. I know it has to be formatted FAT32

 

[Quackinup]

I plugged in an old USB hard drive (after reformatting fat32) and it worked great. Unfortunately it was too large to fit in the USB area. Have since added two 32gb USB flash drives. MFT will only index so many songs (I think 15,000) so anything over about 100gb (depending on bit rate of your mp3's) is going to be wasted. Plus I have seen concerns about the drive spinning up too slow and not being seen by MFT on startup.

Just know that at least the first startup is going to take a while to index. The fuller of my two flash drives can take around 20 minutes to index.

 

[paulfrank285]

thanks guys, good to know.

i guess i don't have to invest in getting a new portable USB harddrive (at least couple hundred GB nowadays?) looks like old ones with less capacity works better!

 

[uniquename]

I used a 320 gig with my original sync. Quackinup hit the problem...index limitation. It made it not worth it to me.

 

[edge929]

I had 60GB and 320GB 2.5" hard drives laying around and was all ready to go this route but then I started thinking, that's a LOT of music, even if they were all ripped at 256kbps so I decided to use a 16GB SD card since it slides in and won't stick out like USB drives not that you'll be in there a ton but I do store 2 cell phones in that area, don't want to chance breaking-off a USB drive when I'm driving and can't look.

I figured I would cycle out new music every 6 months or so. Are you really going to use all 320GB of music? Even 60GB is a ton of music.

 

[uniquename]

I figured I would cycle out new music every 6 months or so. Are you really going to use all 320GB of music? Even 60GB is a ton of music.

I ended up with this solution on my 1.0 sync. (not SD...but smaller amount).

Keep in mind, you can drop 700MB of MP3s on a CD if you want temporary variety.

 

[paulfrank285]

......even if they were all ripped at 256kbps.....

rip them at 320kbps to give you better audio quality since you have so much storage!