alpine ina w910 usb source input

Does anyone know if you can use a USB powered portable hard drive in the USB input on the Alpine INA-W910? Of course it's set up for a thumb drive. I would like to use something with a lot more storage. The USB will charge an iPhone, but I don't know if it's enough to run a small hard drive. Thanks for your input. Brian

probably not enough power and you would have to format the hard drive a different way for it to read at all.

Yes, of course the drive would have to be formatted FAT32. That is in the manual and is a non-issue. I've been trying to find out power consumption of different drives, etc. But that's not very easy to find. And I don't think stores would be very fond of me plugging in a DMM into their drives to test them.

most usb drives on a radio are rated for 800mA i think. some new models are stepping up to a full 1A on the usb. and you have to be careful of some cheaper units where the usb is for charging only.

Maybe an SSD drive would work installed in a USB enclosure, but they aren't cheap. Also, not sure how good of an idea it would be to have a "physical disk" in the car unless it was mounted to some sort of a damper/isolator. HDDs typically don't like bumps or vibration.

Thanks awdeclipse, that seems like the best and safest route. The SSD shouldn't consume as much power.....no motor to spin the drive. And I wouldn't have to worry about bumps and vibration, like you mentioned. Like you said, not cheap....but might be the route I should go with. Thanks again. Brian

SSD's arent as expensive as they were even a year ago. you can get a decent drive with at least 16Gb for maybe $150 now whereas a year ago that same capacity was almost double. but an even cheaper route might be to just get a SDHC card with a usb adapter. it doesnt make sense to get anything bigger than a 16Gb drive because most radios will only read up to a certain amount. so make sure to check the specs on your exact radio   so you dont waste your money on something that wont work.

Agreed, but I would skip the SDHC--->USB adapter and just go with a USB flash drive. 16GB USB Flash/Thumb drives can be purchased for roughly $15. At that price keep two in the car if you need more then 16GB worth of space.

The INA-W910 can "bank" (remember and file) up to 20,000 MP3 songs. So if you average *about* 250 songs per GB....that would be roughly 80GB of storage. While it would be nice to put my all of my favorite music on one storage device, it may not be too 'workable'. Awdeclipse has another decent idea....I guess I could just buy multiple flash drives. Maybe get multiple colors for different types of music and just keep them on a keyring in the vehicle or something like that. That would probably be cheaper and probably quicker for the Alpine to bank the songs and probably find/access them quicker. I will look into this route also. Thank you again for all of your input. Brian

yea but the internal memory has nothing to do with how it reads through the usb port.