USB Flash Drives

[destrekor]

I have a plan:

Put most, if not all, of my MP3/M4A library on a flash drive, connect it a USB cable that connects to the rear of my Pioneer car stereo, and use that for my majority of my drive listening.

Every now and then I envision pulling the drive to refresh the library. If I grab a 128GB drive (best buy), then I would only be adding to it over time. A smaller drive I would be subtracting and adding data, but not routinely. A lot of new music may also simply stay on my phone's internal storage, or streamed through Play Music.

Two questions:

1. Is this going to be fast enough for browsing files on the head unit (touch screen 2DIN unit, so I should see a fair amount of the folders or however the organization appears. Not sure if it's by folder or by ID3 tag only.

I realize write speed will come into play when loading, especially during the initial load of 60GB+ of files, and I'd like to minimize that, but not by paying for a $100+ 128GB drive. I looked at faster 64GB drives, but... I like the idea of having my entire library on there (for now).

2. Is that specific model going to stand up to repeated read access to the files? And I don't know how the mounting/unmounting goes, but there is no transfer of data, so it shouldn't harm the drive. But it would be turned on and off with the car, essentially. Is this kind of abuse going to demand a higher quality drive, or is this already good enough for this purpose?
I know their ExtremePro SD cards seem to hold up to repeated RAW file read/writes from my SLR and computer. But is this far cheaper memory that will wear out more easily?

I do miss my ZuneHD; it came to be my main source of entertainment while driving, and it did last a few years, but it finally started to show memory corruption. Sometimes the songs would stay the same, but after new sync on the desktop, different songs would end up on the corrupted memory blocks. I was sad when I realized what was happening.

 

[Cerb]

0. Lately, there have been some good deals on USB drives. You might even be able to get a 256GB for <$50, with some trickery (you could on BF, for sure).

1. Yes. You may run into problems with many folders, though, and might need to make a multi-level tree, to effectively browse that way.

2A. Reading is never a problem. Only writing, and heat. The greatest risk is writing and powering off, leaving metadata in a state the USB drive isn't capable of recovering from. Really, though, worry about a car's ability to get over 150F in the summer, depending on where you live, not a little writing to the flash.

2B. A cheaper drive will be fine, too. MP3 might need, at most, 1MBps (buffering), so any flash drive will be fast enough. I have the 64GB Ultra like that, and it writes no faster than any other. USB 3.0 is only good for reading, so if you see a cheaper big brand one, go for it. Get your music in the right folder structure on a HDD, start copying, and then just let it go. The first copy of the library will be the worst. At -V2 (LAME), figure you'll be copying a song per second, on average, from then on in, if you don't go out of your way to get a fast drive.

2C. That said, to hedge my bets, I'd take one of the PNY USB 3.0 drive deals that have been going on. Their random writing is as bad as any, but they are OK sequential, which copying a music library should be. If you have a PC you can donate to the cause, maybe even do the McAfee BS at Tigerdirect, then ditch their software once the rebate comes back.

 

[destrekor]

0. Lately, there have been some good deals on USB drives. You might even be able to get a 256GB for <$50, with some trickery (you could on BF, for sure).

1. Yes. You may run into problems with many folders, though, and might need to make a multi-level tree, to effectively browse that way.

2A. Reading is never a problem. Only writing, and heat. The greatest risk is writing and powering off, leaving metadata in a state the USB drive isn't capable of recovering from. Really, though, worry about a car's ability to get over 150F in the summer, depending on where you live, not a little writing to the flash.

2B. A cheaper drive will be fine, too. MP3 might need, at most, 1MBps (buffering), so any flash drive will be fast enough. I have the 64GB Ultra like that, and it writes no faster than any other. USB 3.0 is only good for reading, so if you see a cheaper big brand one, go for it. Get your music in the right folder structure on a HDD, start copying, and then just let it go. The first copy of the library will be the worst. At -V2 (LAME), figure you'll be copying a song per second, on average, from then on in, if you don't go out of your way to get a fast drive.

2C. That said, to hedge my bets, I'd take one of the PNY USB 3.0 drive deals that have been going on. Their random writing is as bad as any, but they are OK sequential, which copying a music library should be. If you have a PC you can donate to the cause, maybe even do the McAfee BS at Tigerdirect, then ditch their software once the rebate comes back.

Well to go back to "cheaper", I'm also looking at how it will handle heat and how many writes I can actually get out of it after exposing it to the extremes of weather (we had -20s last winter, and we've had 100s in the summer, though typically 80s).

And I've heard of some short lifespans with PNY, which is why, even though I did find cheaper, I wasn't too interested. Granted, if it was $50 vs $100, yeah I'd look at the cheaper offering. But $50 vs $35, honestly, it is worth it to me to invest in the more respected brand. I can't think of a bad experience with Sandisk - I may have had a bad thumb drive but IF I did it had lasted all of college, and frankly, I do think it it actually alive, or was... but 512MB or 1GB is rather worthless these days.

 

[Cerb]

I can't argue with that. I have the 64GB I mentioned because my previous keychain 16GB PNY fell apart, I roughed it up and superglued it back together, and that lasted a few more months, the whole time with no real abuse (just getting scratched from keys). Q-u-a-l-i-t-y. The old Sandisk that one was bought to replace I use as a spare small drive, now, and aside from not even being able to write at 2MBps, and no longer having any marking, is just fine.

Heat won't kill the flash itself, but may cause the data to be lost orders of magnitude faster than at room temp. Likelihood for any device, and exactly what, aside from re-writing everything, can or should be done about it: ???

Edit: I got 64GB in size due to BF pricing, but another Cruzer because I haven't had one die on me since wear-leveling got mature several years ago.

 

[destrekor]

I can't argue with that. I have the 64GB I mentioned because my previous keychain 16GB PNY fell apart, I roughed it up and superglued it back together, and that lasted a few more months, the whole time with no real abuse (just getting scratched from keys). Q-u-a-l-i-t-y. The old Sandisk that one was bought to replace I use as a spare small drive, now, and aside from not even being able to write at 2MBps, and no longer having any marking, is just fine.

Heat won't kill the flash itself, but may cause the data to be lost orders of magnitude faster than at room temp. Likelihood for any device, and exactly what, aside from re-writing everything, can or should be done about it: ???

Edit: I got 64GB in size due to BF pricing, but another Cruzer because I haven't had one die on me since wear-leveling got mature several years ago.

Also, I was surprised seeing the write speeds of the higher quality USB 3.0 drives. Some I saw were actually measured by users at over 100MB/s, even only 200MB/s. However, of course, that's only at sequential. However, the 30MB/s and 10MB/s, at 512K and 4K respectively, are still really good USB drive readings for the Sandisk Extreme 64GB drive. That said, I haven't seen that drive in the 128GB size. At $37 for the Extreme 64GB on Amazon, I am sort of tempted to just not worry about holding my ENTIRE library and settling for the better - and yet again, reaching for the best performing drive just for this application is actually a waste of money. I might be focusing on that Extreme model for a future purpose to have around just in case I need large file transfers, but then again, I don't do that often. When I do, I am under my local wifi which can typically perform faster, depending on the specific file circumstances.

 

[mfenn]

I use a cheap PNY "nano" sized USB drive in my car for this exact purpose. The drive has been pretty much constantly in the car for 3 years (excluding brief trips inside to update the music) with no issues. This is through multiple below zero days, the entire car being buried in snow for a week, 100+ degree summer days, etc. I've had zero problems with it. I do make sure that it is not sitting somewhere where it is exposed to direct sunlight, but that's about the only protective measure I take.

With regard to size, you're going to be more limited by the ability of your head unit to parse your folder structure and build a large track list than the physical storage capacity of your drive.

 

[Cerb]

On a side note, one thing that would be nice to know, but which I have not seen any testing of (maybe it's all considered competitive advantage type stuff?), is how well the theoretical persistence of data works out, as far as devices remaining powered on, and also reading old data triggering it to be refreshed, in practice. I've seen reports from drives left powered off completely at given temps (Intel showed wide variation in retention time), but not much with being powered on, but the host not needing to read certain data, for lengths of time, or being powered on with light use like that with short duty cycles (like many laptop users would be doing).

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I use a 64 GB Kingston micro USB 2.0 drive plugged into the front side of a Pioneer head unit. The part that sticks out from the head unit is just big enough to grab---a bit smaller than a jelly bean.

The Pioneer will acknowledge and play up to 15,000 songs. I currently have about 14600 mp3s on my USB stick. Every 6 months or so, I reformat it and reload it from scratch. I've got about 26,000 songs on my hard drive, so there is a slow evolution in which of those 26,000 are selected for use in the car.

I have never had an issue traceable to USB speed. The head unit can index and begin random play from all 14,600 songs within 20 seconds of starting the car. I've used several different sizes of allocation units when formatting, with no noticeable difference in performance. This Kingston USB drive is quite slow actually---it takes over 4 hours to copy 58 GB of songs to it from my hard drive---but that doesn't affect performance in any way I can see.

USB durability could be an issue of course, but they are all fairly flimsy and I'd just expect to have to buy a new one from time to time. I pull my head unit out of the car after every shutdown and keep it indoors, so I don't have to worry about heat issues.

The far more important point is the head unit. Different brands and models vary as to what they will tolerate in the way of file and folder count. The last I checked, a Kenwood will accept no more than 255 songs in any one folder, but I think up to 65,000 songs overall. Pioneer, on the other hand, will accept only 15,000 songs, but they can all be in one folder if you want it that way. I chose Pioneer primarily because my mp3 library is subdivided into 10 genres, which contain anywhere from a few hundred to over 8,000 songs. I couldn't tolerate a 255 song per folder limit.

Most of the manuals I've looked through don't go into enough detail about folder/file limits. You just have to experiment.

Browsing for songs by a driver is pretty much a useless proposition in my experience. You don't dare take your eyes off the road for any length of time. Even if stopped completely, you are always fighting sunlight glare. Not to mention the small navigation buttons and getting to the nested folders you probably have. If you have a folder of 1000 songs that begins with Aardvark and ends with Zebra, you may have to use a scroll knob to move through it---at maybe 10 or 20 songs per knob twist. That will get old real quick. So, nearly all of my listening is random play--either from one of my genre folders or from the entire USB stick. I always have preferred NOT knowing what the next song might be.

 

[destrekor]

I've got the Sandisk Ultra 128GB 3.0 drive.

I'm not worried about limits just yet, that said, I can't get it to be recognized by the receiver. I have it formatted MBR HFS+, which seems to be exactly what Pioneer dictates for other receivers.

I have some cheap Lexar 16GB drives that I felt I could use to verify a specific drive type or partition size isn't compatible with the receiver, but formatted the exact same, that too did not get recognized by the receiver.

I'm going to try FAT32 and see if that does the trick. Perhaps this unit is strangely not compatible with HFS+, but that makes no sense, since it supports iPods/iOS devices with direct USB control. Or perhaps the two flash drives I can dedicate to the cause are both not compatible for some strange reason.

 

[mfenn]

I've got the Sandisk Ultra 128GB 3.0 drive.

I'm not worried about limits just yet, that said, I can't get it to be recognized by the receiver. I have it formatted MBR HFS+, which seems to be exactly what Pioneer dictates for other receivers.

I have some cheap Lexar 16GB drives that I felt I could use to verify a specific drive type or partition size isn't compatible with the receiver, but formatted the exact same, that too did not get recognized by the receiver.

I'm going to try FAT32 and see if that does the trick. Perhaps this unit is strangely not compatible with HFS+, but that makes no sense, since it supports iPods/iOS devices with direct USB control. Or perhaps the two flash drives I can dedicate to the cause are both not compatible for some strange reason.

iPods and iPhones do not present a raw block device with an HFS+ filesystem over USB, they present a form of MTP device.

Anyway, your best bet is to format the USB device with a good ole' FAT32 filesystem (or exFAT as newer versions of Windows call it).

 

[Automaticman]

When Pioneer first started adding USB ports to the head units I remember that they specified the use of FAT32.

I personally just grabbed a cheap 32GB drive from MicroCenter and have been using it with the Sync system in my Mustang for years now. That system has the huge added benefit of voice control for music selection, which I always thought was the biggest limitation of the Pioneer setups.

If I remember, some of the higher end Pioneer units had voice control as well, but I think it was mostly the NAV and other double-DIN video head units.

What would be really cool is if you could connect to your house's wifi and just transfer mp3s wirelessly down to the car parked in the garage. I always for get to unplug the USB drive to bring in and add new music to.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I'm going to try FAT32 and see if that does the trick. Perhaps this unit is strangely not compatible with HFS+, but that makes no sense, since it supports iPods/iOS devices with direct USB control. Or perhaps the two flash drives I can dedicate to the cause are both not compatible for some strange reason.

I'd be quite surprised if FAT32 did not work. I can't recall ever reading that a standard head unit wanted anything else.

You may find that Windows is cranky about letting you format USB sticks the way you want.

If so, take a look at this tool, which I've used successfully:

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm

Just put it somewhere like the root of your C drive and run it from the command line.

You can adjust the allocation unit size as well if you want.

Fat32format &#8211;c16 G

The above command will force an allocation unit size of 8192 bytes on the G drive, which will allow a few more songs to fit on a given USB drive than the default 32768 bytes.

 

[destrekor]

Well I used OS X to format the drive, which was using a fresh library download from iTunes Match. I felt it easiest, though Disk Utility does default to GUID, which Pioneer mentioned was not compatible for other receivers and devices.

First thing today, I knew I should test FAT32, and looking back, I was stupid to not attempt that first, prior to posting this thread. It seems like a given to at least try FAT32 above all else for sheer compatibility. Doh!

And indeed, it works. It might be a short-term solution anyhow, for I might just be making the move to a new phone with SD Card capability. The long-term solution is a phone to handle everything, which can house Android 5.0, and eventually have a head unit that features Android Auto. In the short term, my head unit does support Mirrorlink, and the phones that are at the top of my list (LG G3, Sony Experia Z3V) support that as well. So I can have my navigation on the dash display and have all my audio and calls routed to that as well.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Anyway, your best bet is to format the USB device with a good ole' FAT32 filesystem (or exFAT as newer versions of Windows call it).

I just wanted comment on this, lest anyone think that exFAT is simply a new name for FAT32 - it's not. It's a new version of a FAT filesystem, one that allows for files to be larger than 4GB (one of the major limitations of FAT32).

 

[dullard]

You way WAY overthought this. Get the cheapest, slowest, large capacity USB drive you can get, and in 10 years if it dies, replace it. Far better than using your expensive phone!

I've used USB for car audio for years. Not one single problem with drive speed, temperature, or reliability. The only problem that I have is that some stereos don't allow subfolders which makes navigation of many songs a pain.

 

[destrekor]

You way WAY overthought this. Get the cheapest, slowest, large capacity USB drive you can get, and in 10 years if it dies, replace it. Far better than using your expensive phone!

I've used USB for car audio for years. Not one single problem with drive speed, temperature, or reliability. The only problem that I have is that some stereos don't allow subfolders which makes navigation of many songs a pain.

Yeah, that over-thinking thing, I'm often guilty of that. lol

As for better than phone: I agree, for memory cell life, it is better to not overuse the phone. This is true for a phone like my Moto X, which only has internal memory. For a phone with an SD Card, the card is abused, just like a thumb drive. Another point: a phone is rarely tasked with more than a few years of usage, whereas dedicated media devices we often run into the ground. Case in point: my ZuneHD survived through a few phone upgrades, until I killed it from repeated use and library shuffling.

I mostly looked at speed for "post-car-audio" life, as I did not expect to be using this for a significant amount of time (years). Turns out, it looks like I have a few ways of keeping unlimited data with a contract upgrade, so I can afford the phones I'd prefer right away instead of biding my time. This was also going to be a proof of concept to see if I could almost completely reduce my streaming usage (32GB phone can't hold much audio!) so I could live with tiered data plans. I might yet be able to get the best of both worlds, though I'll miss the awesome utility features of the Moto X.
Interestingly, it seems the radios/signal strength on the LG G3 seem to match my Moto X. I wasn't expecting that. Three of my buddies have one, and I might join them. lol Although that Z3V is awfully tempting, but I'm scared for the apparent lack of root support.