As mentioned in the car PC thread, I've been really wanting an easy way to have my entire music library on a portable hard drive and to be able to play music off it through either a quality head unit or car PC, especially since I can get a 300GB drive for like $150-200.
After researching, a few quality brands offer usb capable head units but with some major drawbacks.
Clarion: has one model and the USB port can only handle 255 songs with 30 characters per filename or something stupid, so that's useless for mass storage.
Alpine: coming out with a $150 adaptor in July 06, but still no details on file limits or the way it will organize...
Kenwood: seems to be able to handle larger usb drives like 40-60GB, although the USB power is limited to 500ma so some laptop hardrives will not get enough power to work (i.e. some 5400-7200 rpm drives). Also the folders are simply numbered 1,2,3,4 which is brutal for someone like me who has 10,000 songs in a few hundred folders.
I'm upset that more major players aren't hip to what us guys want and I may have to go the car PC route to be able to play my 10,000 song library (I'm a DJ btw), PLUS have the ability to rip my CD's in WAV format and maintain top notch sound quality, all while fitting onto a 300+ Gig hard drive. What a PITA.
After researching, a few quality brands offer usb capable head units but with some major drawbacks.
Clarion: has one model and the USB port can only handle 255 songs with 30 characters per filename or something stupid, so that's useless for mass storage.
Alpine: coming out with a $150 adaptor in July 06, but still no details on file limits or the way it will organize...
Kenwood: seems to be able to handle larger usb drives like 40-60GB, although the USB power is limited to 500ma so some laptop hardrives will not get enough power to work (i.e. some 5400-7200 rpm drives). Also the folders are simply numbered 1,2,3,4 which is brutal for someone like me who has 10,000 songs in a few hundred folders.
I'm upset that more major players aren't hip to what us guys want and I may have to go the car PC route to be able to play my 10,000 song library (I'm a DJ btw), PLUS have the ability to rip my CD's in WAV format and maintain top notch sound quality, all while fitting onto a 300+ Gig hard drive. What a PITA.
