Different brands and models vary as to what they will tolerate in the way of file and folder count. The far more important point is the head unit. 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.
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. 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. I've used several different sizes of allocation units when formatting, with no noticeable difference in performance. The head unit can index and begin random play from all 14,600 songs within 20 seconds of starting the car. I have never had an issue traceable to USB speed. 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. Every 6 months or so, I reformat it and reload it from scratch. I currently have about 14600 mp3s on my USB stick. The Pioneer will acknowledge and play up to 15,000 songs. The part that sticks out from the head unit is just big enough to grab-a bit smaller than a jelly bean. I use a 64 GB Kingston micro USB 2.0 drive plugged into the front side of a Pioneer head unit.
#60gb usb flash drive pny 2.0 software#
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. Their random writing is as bad as any, but they are OK sequential, which copying a music library should be. That said, to hedge my bets, I'd take one of the PNY USB 3.0 drive deals that have been going on. 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.ĢC. The first copy of the library will be the worst. Get your music in the right folder structure on a HDD, start copying, and then just let it go. USB 3.0 is only good for reading, so if you see a cheaper big brand one, go for it. I have the 64GB Ultra like that, and it writes no faster than any other. MP3 might need, at most, 1MBps (buffering), so any flash drive will be fast enough. 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.ĢB. The greatest risk is writing and powering off, leaving metadata in a state the USB drive isn't capable of recovering from. You may run into problems with many folders, though, and might need to make a multi-level tree, to effectively browse that way.ĢA. You might even be able to get a 256GB for <$50, with some trickery (you could on BF, for sure).ġ. Lately, there have been some good deals on USB drives. I was sad when I realized what was happening.Ġ. 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 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. But is this far cheaper memory that will wear out more easily? I know their ExtremePro SD cards seem to hold up to repeated RAW file read/writes from my SLR and computer. Is this kind of abuse going to demand a higher quality drive, or is this already good enough for this purpose?
But it would be turned on and off with the car, essentially. 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.
I like the idea of having my entire library on there (for now).Ģ. 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. Not sure if it's by folder or by ID3 tag only. 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. A lot of new music may also simply stay on my phone's internal storage, or streamed through Play Music.ġ. A smaller drive I would be subtracting and adding data, but not routinely. If I grab a 128GB drive ( best buy), then I would only be adding to it over time. 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.Įvery now and then I envision pulling the drive to refresh the library.