Idea

I've been looking around at double din head units and have noticed a lot have USB ports on them. Rather than having to carry and iPod around, would it be possible to set up an external hard drive with a head unit and store all your music/movies on there. I could install/hide a hard drive in my truck pretty easy and then have the ability to carry my entire music collection, rather than just cutting it down to 8gb..

Anyone ever done this or know if it would work?

 

cant speak for other brands but alpine's w900 doesnt allow what u want because i thought of that too.....figured it would be cheaper to use a flash drive instead of an ipod.

 

i have a pioneer double din, and If i can any way put music onto something with a usb imput wire, it will play it. I bought a 16gig usb thumb drive that has all my music on and i just plug it into there and play it. but i usually listen to slacker radio on my phone.. Im sure it just depends on what head unit your using..

here is a picture of mine in my xrunner

 

The answer is "it depends".

All USB flash drives will work because they take almost no energy to power. The external hard drives will NOT in most cases because they take more energy to spin up to operating RPM. I've tried it with a Pioneer AVIC-X910bt and an Eclipse AVN726e and neither worked. I do believe some units might get it to work but it's something you should research before buying.

I have not tried a SSD though. My guess is that would work just fine. I use a 16GB flash drive as well as the member that posted above.

 

Kenwood does flash drives but it requires it to be formatted a specific way and for audio files to be organised a specific way. Wont do hard drives.