Picked up my brand new vivid blue i30 CRDi SLX this morning, bright and early of course!

Lovely car, as we all know.

Spent most of the morning playing around with the USB interface trying to get a handle on how it works, and optimising a 120GB Western Digital portable USB drive to work with it the easiest way.

My aim is to get it working with about 30GB of music on the drive. Here are some observations so far. If anyone has any useful comments, then please feel free to respond, I'd appreciate the help.

- The WD HDD powers fine via the 500mA supply from the i30 USB port, but the startup time of the HDD is long enough that the i30 head unit does not recognise it quickly enough when the ignition is first switched to ACC. The outcome of this is that, if you are driving along listening to the music on the USB drive, then stop and turn the car off, when you get back in and turn the car on again, the head unit does not see the USB drive for a while, then when it comes online it thinks a new USB drive has just been plugged in, searches through it and plays the default first track again instead of continuing play from the last point.

- When a small USB pen drive (the one that was supplied with the vehicle) is used, it commences play from the last point, as it is supposed to.

- The initial search time when 30GB of music is first attached is very long, maybe just under a minute, though I don't see a way to improve this.

- I have seen a report from someone else that they are able to access more than one partition on a drive. I don't seem to be able to do this at all. It always shows me only the files on the last (alphabetical drive letter, as Windows determines it) partition. How can it be made to see more than one partition?

- The biggest problem I have with the interface is the fact that it does not seem to handle nested folders. By which I mean, if you store the mp3s of an album in a folder called "sergeant pepper" for example, then store that folder within a folder called "the beatles", then store that under a folder called "B", then when the i30 reads the USB drive, it assigns all the tracks in an album to a root directory, with only the album folder to differentiate them. Whilst this is fine if you only have a GB or two of music (as was intended I suppose when they designed the interface), if you have 30GB of music and want to jump from ACDC to Paul Simon (quite a large change in mood I will agree) then you have a lot of button-pushing to do, it will take you 5 minutes! By storing mp3s under the alphabetical letter of the band's name, it is quicker, but you may still have 300 or 400 songs to scroll through.... I am guessing they wanted an interface that was simple enough that people wouldn't get distracted whilst driving etc., and of course for a small data set it works great, but causes a problem with a large data set. Any solutions?

Cheers,

Benjamin/

Benjamin,

I assume you found my posting regards my experimenting with an 80gb drive, partitioned in many different ways until I setttled on a 32gb single partition with the remainder as an NTFS partition for data.

I never, with all the senarios I tried, had the large waiting time for the drive to be read. I agree with you about the multiple partitions being read as one by the i30 head unit. However, I didn't have the issue with the drive starting back at the first file. It always went on from the last track, even mid-way through the file.

One way around the problem with the album trawling would be to cooperate with the unit. It only reads one level of folders so having nested folders won't work. Here's a sollution I would use.

Work out your classifications which could be performers, make folders for them and then put your files in the respective folders. If you think it through, you could name each track as album (abbreviated perhaps) followed by track (prefixex by the number of the track).

Example: \Beatles\Abbey Road 01 Come Together.mp3

Do you get my drift?

I ended up purchasing a 16gb pen drive and using it as it was too much of a pain to disconnect and reconnect the portable HDD all the time. One thing I have noticed is the HDD gave better data to the head unit than the pen drive in that the head unit now says the USB has 666 tracks even when I add more files where as the HDD gave a precise number somewhere just over 900. It may be that I have got more than a 1000 tracks now and the poor thing just can't cope. The important thing is all the tracks play.

Best of luck with your HDD Benjamin

Bob

Hi Bob,

Thanks for the reply.

Interesting about the differences between the drives. Maybe it is something else causing it to take a long time to read the data initially, not sure what that may be though.

Are you able to provide any more information about the way the disk was formatted? I am formatting using FAT32, all other settings default.

Thanks,

Benjamin.

I'm using a SATA drive in an enclosure, about 80gb and it's showing the same problem, switches back to the root after a power down..
I've been experimenting with SD Cards, and a card reader, which works great, and does not follow the issue with the USB HDD, that is, the tracks play from the last track played after a restart.. SD Cards could be a good alternative as you can keep a library of cards with different genres etc and insert the one you want when you want..
Still my testing to be done, ie. multiple cards n the same reader etc..

That's an awesome idea foxey :)

In regards to the nested folders, I have mine organised like this

/artist/album/track - title

When I use the folder navigation buttons (or the "file" scroller), it shows me tracks in order by artist, then album, then track number.

For example, if I have

/Ween/Quebec/...
/Ween/Shinola Vol1/...
/White Stripes, The/Elephant/...

If I start at Quebec track 1, scrolling forwards gives me all the songs on Quebec, then the songs on Shinola Vol1, then Elephant. If I use the folder navigation buttons, I get the same thing (only it jumps to the first track in each folder).

Seems to handle sorting in nested folders just fine. Of course, the display will only show the album at the top with the track underneath (scrolled for long titles). I sort of have to remember each artist.