Anyone know of a Head Unit that works well with a Hard Drive?

[Sharpe]

Hello,

My current system has an Alpine CDA 117, which works great! No Problems.

The aggravating part is syncing my ipod with itunes.

Does anyone know of a head unit that work well with an external hard drive, or mp3 player?

These areas are not strengths for the CDA 117.

Has anyone tried any alternatives, like running a hard drive to a tablet, and then the tablet to the deck?

Thanks

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[d77543020 10+ year member]

the 2012 pioneer decks at least the 9400bh have a higher usb voltage out so you can use a hard drive on them

 

[vancamp]

I put an Alpine INE-S920HD into my car. Although it's relatively nice for some things, it's not particularly good dealing with large music collections on either disc or USB SSD/HDD/Flash.

There are 2 methods for navigating the drives... by "folder" or by "tag". Unfortunately, "folder" doesn't allow browsing a folder hierarchy... it just flattens every folder that has mp3's in it into a list (based on order on the disc, not alphabetical). On a moderately large USB drive, navigating by "tag" search appears to be the more useful approach, however, it also seems to be less capable than expected. It's impossible to "search" (browse) to anywhere by tags until the unit has added the file to it's tag library. Unfortunately, building this library appears to happen at least each time the unit is turned on, and doesn't finish on my SSD drive (~100GB of mp3 music on a 128GB drive) for >20 minutes. So the only things it will find quickly are the files at the beginning of the disk. It remembers what it was playing last time and starts that immediately, but if it was part of something that hasn't been found yet on the library rebuild, it won't go beyond that song.

I'm very interested in whether you find a stock HU that deals well with HDDs.

 

[d77543020 10+ year member]

9400 bh took care of this problem to its called smart tag it lets you serch for your music like you would on a ipod

I put an Alpine INE-S920HD into my car. Although it's relatively nice for some things, it's not particularly good dealing with large music collections on either disc or USB SSD/HDD/Flash.
There are 2 methods for navigating the drives... by "folder" or by "tag". Unfortunately, "folder" doesn't allow browsing a folder hierarchy... it just flattens every folder that has mp3's in it into a list (based on order on the disc, not alphabetical). On a moderately large USB drive, navigating by "tag" search appears to be the more useful approach, however, it also seems to be less capable than expected. It's impossible to "search" (browse) to anywhere by tags until the unit has added the file to it's tag library. Unfortunately, building this library appears to happen at least each time the unit is turned on, and doesn't finish on my SSD drive (~100GB of mp3 music on a 128GB drive) for >20 minutes. So the only things it will find quickly are the files at the beginning of the disk. It remembers what it was playing last time and starts that immediately, but if it was part of something that hasn't been found yet on the library rebuild, it won't go beyond that song.

I'm very interested in whether you find a stock HU that deals well with HDDs.

 

[vancamp]

The 9400BH manual states "Typically, it will take approximately 70 seconds to create an index for 1 000 songs", so for it's stated limit of 15,000 songs it looks like it's also dealing with over 15 minutes? Does that index continue without rebuild the next time the car is started? I'm familiar with older Pioneer decks hanging on "FORMAT READ" for a while when started.

 

[d77543020 10+ year member]

I have a 8400bh with 3000 songs on my flash drive and it takes about 10 second its a lil faster when you restart the car but I went to blue tooth streaming 10 seconds was to long for me

 

[vancamp]

I've thrown in the towel... I picked up an iPod Classic simply to store my music files for the Alpine. It works well (160GB), but I wished the USB HDD/flash would've worked.

 

[TaylorFade 10+ year member]

Good lord. you guys really need 500 gigs of music? Who needs that many songs? Geez.

 

[zako 10+ year member]

I tried using an external 320gb USB hard drive with a Kenwood head unit, and that didn't work well, with the hard drive resetting frequently. I think the problem is that the head unit USB port may be too weak to power a hard drive. Right now, I am using my Pioneer head unit with 32GB SSD drives and the works perfect.