headunit with hard drive

I've been thinking about ditching my carputer and going back to (some what) conventional methods of car audio.

I've been trying to find a head unit, made by a reputable company, that has an internal hard drive.

Right now I have about 10 gigs of MP3s that I use on the car PC, but I want to re-encode all of them (I have the CDs ... don't see that very often, do you?), so that would probably double the double the size.

So I'm not asking for a 250gb hard drive, just like 20 or 40 (leave room for expansion)

I was looking around, and it seems that I can only find head units with usb ports in the front, and some of those can't support drives higher than 2gb.

Can anyone point me in a good direction (company / model number / etc)?

Kenwood makes a few receivers with USB input...it says they'll work with flash drives so I don't see why it shouldn't work with a HDD as long as you have a way to power it (12v power inverter or something to allow you to plug the HDD in).

Kenwood KDC-MP535U
Kenwood Excelon KDC-X491
Kenwood Excelon KDC-X591


I've never had a problem with my Kenwood receiver

Sorry for double post but I can't edit my posts and I just wanted to clarify-

With the receivers I posted, if you use a thumb drive (flash drive) you won't need to power the drive, but if you plan on using a real hard drive (like 20gb+) odds are you'll need to hook up a power line from the HDD's plug to the car.

Another option is if you have a mp3 player (not necessarily an ipod) almost all receivers have an aux in in the back that you can run a cable from directly to your mp3 player

jvc also has a few modles that have usb. how ever i canot rember the modles.

Anyone else that can recommend something with an internal drive?

I'd prefer not to have to rig up a hard drive to the car. I know its not that hard, considering everything in a computer is 12v, but a computer has more constant power, a car can be anywhere from 11.9 - 14.4. I don't know how that would effect the drive.

Also, mounting can be an issue.

The AVIC Z2 is coming out. i dont know how much memory it has on it. but the AVIC Z1 had a 30GB hard drive in it. So i would guess that the AVIC Z2 would have a bigger hard drive. Check it out. might be what your looking for. word. Oh and the new pioneer decks have the usb input on the face as well now for flash memory. word

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"dont ground out!"

AVIC, that sounds failure, wasn't that like a GPS / NAV / flipout screen kinda deal? That might be a little rich for me.

Depending on what stereo you currently have you might consider a PIE or PAC AUX adapter.  That way you can use what ever MP3 player you want that has a nice storage capacity (Archos, Zune, iPod, Creative etc etc).  Plus this way it wasily removable from the vehicle so you can hook it to your home computer and update the songs anytime you want or take them with you on the go when your not in your vehicle.

Currently, I have a carputer, AKA a computer with a 7" touch screen. I want to go back to having a head unit. I also have no MP3 player, and no need for one. I have a gig of storage on my phone, which I have wireless stereo headphones for, that is all I need for portable music.

But for the car I take long trips. I had an MP3 CD player before, and I still couldn't put enough music on one disc to satisfy me. I like to be able to select a genre (or in some cases a folder) and just have that on random. Since I have over a gig of music for a couple artists, that leaves me out of luck when I want to have that artist's genre on random. Currently I have 9.8gigs of music, and that's only for 54 artists (I like having discographies).

The new JVC 5000 has a 40 gig harddrive and is single din with Nav. The harddrive is partitioned for 16 gigs nav and 24 gigs for music, and uses a 3.5 inch screen. Canadian Retail is 1299.99 I dont know what it is in the states.

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double-secret reverse-osmosis speaker-cone-induced high-level interference distortion, Its a killer