I was wondering if I buy a HU with built in USB, if it would be possible to run an external HDD from it? Will the usb provide the needed power? Thanks in advance.

 

Most decks (HU) that I know of do not support an external hard drive. Mine has a sd card slot as well as a mini usb port and they are both for media, music, video and pics. I use my usb port to charge my droid phone. The sd slot I have a 16 gb memory card with 8 movies on it. To know for sure you would have to do some research on what kind of HU you are looking at and what they support. I forgot to mention that today alot of people are using the usb for their ipods. Hope this helps.

 

I have a 16G thumb drive full of music that I use in my USB slot... I get tired of scrolling through that thing to find a certain album. with an entire external HD I coulld only imagine how annoying and frustrating that would be.

That said, I have not seen one that will support a HD, but who knows, someone might be making one. have you looked into a carputer? MP3CAR.com....

 

My head unit, a Sony Xplod something something, at times has problems reading every item on my 32GB flash drive. Sometimes it decides to show all albums/songs, sometimes just a few.
Not sure if that's my flash drive or my head unit's fault, but just tossin' in all I know.

 

Most HU's are limited to the amount of data they can access on the storage media. There's a good chance your current HU is limited to something less than 32Gb. It's occasionally working probably due to having a good controller for the USB. I've had success with using external HDD's on HU's, but they had to be within the size limitation of the HU it was being attached to, which is REALLY hard to find these days.

 

Thanks for the info guys. Has anyone here gone the Carputer direction? Im currently running a stock deck and just looking for options for upgrades. After looking through that mp3car site, its very tempting to consider that route. Looks like there are some good barebone kits out there just needing a HD and OS.

 

I've really been thinking about the best affordable ways to have a carputer because I really really really want one. If you figure out a cheap good route, by all means, let me hear it.

 

I found a cheap Dell desktop for about 50 bucks, 200G hd, 3 G ram, 1G processor. it was a mini size so it wasnt all that hard to stuff in the trunk. I bought a decent power supply from mp3car.com and a touch screen lcd screen. finagled to audio to output to my amps and was rocking the carputer for a while. ran it for about a year, but then my car got the blue screen of death... I think it was due to the vibrations from the road and what not damaging the HD, but with todays SSD drives that is no linger an issue.

You can get a motherboard processor, ram combo for a little over 100, case fro 50, cheap end screen for 200 and an SSD drive for about 100-200 (not completely sure about these... I have never really looked for them, but I saw two on craigslist the other day for 100.) This is a good start.

Or you can buy fully built ones for around 500 from various places, just google Carputer.

 

Not to hijack this thread, but one question, did you constantly have to turn it on/off whenever you went in your vehicle? Like if you went for a couple minute drive, did you even turn it on?

 

Will I need a normal deck to go along with the carputer? Did a little searching and I came across these already built. Just missing a HD and OS. Prices seem to be pretty fair. MitxPC - Mini-ITX Embedded System Solutions and Component ProviderCar PC Solutions, Car PC Systems. Plenty of room in the blazer for this so why not. If in a couple of weeks I do decide to go this route I will keep you guys updated. Any info or tips would be great for anyone who has done it before. Thanks