stereo, hard drive

Is there any aftermarket item that would allow the hookup of a harddrive of music? I have a factory nav with xm and I know they make stuff for ipods but I would like to just hook up my drive that has all my music. Thanks Michael

Nope, nothing that will just allow use of a hard drive by itself.

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if your radio has a USB input then you can use a thumb drive but chances are that any radio wont be able to read a hard drive because it has too much memory. most radios will only read up to 8GB maybe 16GB through a USB drive.

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It would really help to know what kind of vehicle you have.  There may be an input adapter for your vehicle, if so, as stated above there is no way to just connect the drive to the radio.  However you could connect a laptop to the deck and connect the hard drive to the laptop.

05 chevy avalanche, touchscreen navigation w/xm. Thanks Michael

Is the laptop going to be an option?

Yes I could do that, I have a 1/8 phono plug now that I use with my ipod. The cheapest way would just come out of the laptop headphone jack to it. Thanks Michael

soundnsecurity wrote:

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if your radio has a USB input then you can use a thumb drive but chances are that any radio wont be able to read a hard drive because it has too much memory. most radios will only read up to 8GB maybe 16GB through a USB drive.

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First, it's storage or space, not memory. Memory is volatile, and whatever is in it goes away upon removal of power. Storage is NON-volatile, and the data contained on it remains after removal of power. They are very different and perform completely different functions.

Second, it has nothing to do with the drive's capacity. It has EVERYTHING to do with the drive's FORMAT! Decks that support external storage cannot read NTFS, the drive must be formatted as FAT32. Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7 can only format up to 32GB as FAT32. Anything larger must use the native Windows NTFS. There are utilities that will allow you to format larger partitions as FAT32 for backward compatibility. My favorite? SwissKnife. A freebie, and it works... Look it up on Google.

As long as the USB port on the deck can support the necessary power requirements to keep the drive spinning and reading correctly, there should be no issues at all with drive capacites up to 500GB and larger, as long as it is formatted as FAT32, and NOT NTFS!

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It all reminds me of something that Molière once said to Guy de Maupassant at a café in Vienna: "That's nice. You should write it down."

haemphyst wrote:

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soundnsecurity wrote:

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if your radio has a USB input then you can use a thumb drive but chances are that any radio wont be able to read a hard drive because it has too much memory. most radios will only read up to 8GB maybe 16GB through a USB drive.

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First, it's storage or space, not memory. Memory is volatile, and whatever is in it goes away upon removal of power. Storage is NON-volatile, and the data contained on it remains after removal of power. They are very different and perform completely different functions.

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whew, im glad you cleared that up . i guess that means my computer has alzheimers. i would think the terms are interchangeable. ROM (read only MEMORY, aka. CD, DVD, etc ) isn't volitile, yet it is classified as MEMORY, not read only storage or read only space.

ROM

BUT, thanks for explaining the technical details of using a HDD on a car stereo, i still learned something

p.s. im not trying to start a war, just pointing out that there was no reason to correct my terminology, we cant all be IP techniciansand please excuse my gross ignorance.

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