!!!Just hooked a sata drive to my pioneer AVH-3200bt!!!

I never thought this would work but I just got a sata drive with a usb caddy to work on my avh-3200bt.

I formatted the drive to fat32. Ran an extension cord to my truck plugged it in and it works.

I ran some hdd test with hd_speed and here is what i got:

sata drive with usb caddy 30mb/s
ipod classic 60gb 14mb/s
ipod nano 4gb 10mb/s
32gb sdhc class10 14.8mb/s

1tb 3.5in drive = $60
64gb ipod touch = $499
duh

question is, is there any regulated 12v power in the truck? Anyone know?

 

I threw some in a folder and some on the root drive and it see's it all.

 

Its very handy if you download movies as well.

 

JUst realized that the 2.5 sata also has 5v going into it. I removed the 5v line and it still works.

 

Yeah I would imagine the only downside would be sorting through a lot of music given that it's in folder view....can you still search through the hdd alphabetically or can you only use the arrow keys. (have a 4200DVD this would be a cool addition for me if the sorting works well)

 

Couple of things to keep in mind.

If you're using only a USB to connect power and data, then you're limited to 500mA of power. Alot of HDDs won't spin up at that power level. Keep your USB cable as short as possible to ensure that as much power as possible reaches the drive.

The more data you have on a drive, whether USB or HDD, the longer the time it takes to index and show the drive's directory.

When I first received my USB enabled HU several years ago, I tried to connect a HDD to it and it would not spin up (not enough power for drive spin-up). At that time I have the stock USB 3 ft cable and another 3 ft cable to change the cable end genders. Once I removed one of the cables and replaced it with a gender changer, the HDD would spin-up and function correctly.

Downside was the indexing time for the HDD, it's not as fast as a USB stick, so startup is much slower. I ended up using a 16Gb USB stick.

BTW, I just upgraded to a Pioneer P4300dvd and found that the USB index time has about tripled for the 4300 as opposed to my older HU for the same USB stick.

 

Wasn't plannignon using usb power. Sata requires 12v 5v and 3.5v so far it looks like it'll run on only 12v so I'm searching for a voltage regulator. I could always just plug the ac adapter that came with the usb caddy into the 120v plug on the truck that seems a little ghetto though when I could just get a small regulator to hold the 12v at 12v.

I just tried it with 7000 songs on it and you were right, it just sat there reading the format. I don't understand though. I had more than 7000 songs on my ipod and this has a faster read rate... I wonder if there's a way to index everything into a file that the HU will read faster so that it doesn't have to index each seperate file.

 

I don't believe that the iPod requires an index build, but a USB stick/HDD does. Not sure why, haven't researched it, but suspect the iPod just doesn't allow direct USB drive functions, or it knows to use the iPod index. Also haven't seen anything that will alow a faster index creation on these HUs, didn't both me too much until now with the 4300.

 

So this idea is out the door. I never realized what the ipod brought to the HU. Link, artist, song searches... and this building of an index is just too much wasted time. There's a reason the manual says 2gb sd card only, because anything more and the index takes forever.

 

Yeah it brings more that you think, it's just at a pretty high cost/GB.


Just as an FYI, I noted the following differences between the 4300 and my old DEH-P690UB as far as USB is concerned.

• 690 would index the USB on power up, no matter if it was set on USB or not, definite benefit to listen to the radio for the first minute or so until the indexing was done. 4300 will not index until USB is actually selected, then HAVE to wait for it to index.
• 690 index time for 16GB USB stick was 20-25 seconds, 4300 index time is over a minute for the same USB stick. Doesn't sound like much, but get in, start up the truck, tune the HU off, and count to 60, it's more of a PITA than you think.
• 690 directory was alpha-numerically sorted, 4300 is sorted by directory/file creation date (Need to run the USB stick through a FAT table sorter to get the 4300 directory to come up in alpha order,,, took over a hr)

I'm actually quite disapointed in Pioneer for allowing these items to "regress" form the older/cheaper 690 to the 4300. I've sent email to their support line, but have been given nothing but BS responses.

Now in the 4300's defense, it has a great user interface, easy to use/setup, great support for I* devices, and sounds great, but their USB support is seriously degraded.

 

One thing that would concern me. Not sure that it would happen, but thought I'd throw it out for consideration. Hard drives don't like bouncing around and vibrations so be careful about that. Solid State Disks (SSDs) prices are dropping all the time so that might be another idea to look at. A quick search on Newegg found several 2.5" 64GB SSDs for a little above a hundred bucks.

 

I think SSDs would be the most vibration resistant, but the small size (not capacity) HDDs aren't all that fragile anymore. I have a laptop w/HDD as a carputer in my MR2 Spyder - going on 5 years now without any disc problems.

Admittedly I didn't take the Spyder out for any rock crawling events, but the day-today road vibrations are of a much higher frequency and feel much more jarring than I experience on the same roads with the Tacoma.

 

i just ordered the 4300 i cant wait to put it in the taco. hopes its as good as ive read.

 

Only downside to the 4300 that I have found is the mentioned USB index time for USB sticks or HDDs. Everything else works great. Note that I finally timed my USB stick index time (Format Read). I have 12GB of data on my 16GB USB and it takes 55 seconds before it will start to play. I'm seriously considering finding another used Touch to use instead of the USB stick. A full minute to wait for it to start playing is just too much of a PITA.

 

And that's why I returned my AVIC X-910bt and bought the Eclipse AVN726e.

 

Unfortunately I'm neck deep with Pioneer as I did not want to re-capitalize all my modules, wiring interfaces, SWI, etc. I've had a couple of not quite too nice email convo's with Pioneer Support on the contents of post 12. It's one thing to just not have the USB index time and order capability, but to have it in one set of HUs and not the other makes me re-think my vendor. But it does work so well for everything except USB drives.... and Eclipse is so out of business

 

I use a 16gb sd card, and the load time is about 30 seconds, which can be very annyoing. It is nice to know the ipod does not suffer from this. However, I don't like the idea of a cable hanging out of my player all the time.

I decided it was easier and cheaper to load my music on a couple of dual-layer DVDs, and the load time is very fast...