[Master_Scythe]

Now, I know a lot of people have been having trouble with using LARGE drives on the i30.

I cant speak for certain, but I have a pretty educated theory as to why this is; To start I'll have to explain my assumptions of the Radio system.

What I assume is that its onboard cache is quite small. One section will have enough to buffer and decode the part of the MP3, and another will take care of disk management (last file played, FAT table, etc)
And if said radio is written in a form of UNIX or BASIC, its likely the cache is shared (but i cant be bothered finding out, its not THAT important).

Now onto my educated and tested guess work

Here is the reason why people are having trouble with large drives:
http://www.storagereview.com/guide/partFAT32.html

With an 8GB USB stick, you have a FAT of 8MB, the FAT needs to be accessed CONSTANTLY to know where a file starts and ends, when you want to shuffle, etc.
By formatting to 32KB clusters, my File Allocation Tables shrink to 1MB, a potential 8X speed increase when referencing the FAT (so.... almost always).

The down side? A cluster is the 'minimum size' data can be on a disk. So if you save a 1KB txt file, it will take up 32KB.
HOWEVER, even worst case scenario (so, 2000 songs per stick, EVERY song is 1kb too big, and wastes a cluster) I'm only losing 64MB of space. And that'll never happen.


So, case point friends. Format your USB sticks to larger clusters (16kb should be fine if you dont want to risk wasting much space, default is 4kb, still, 32KB recommended). You do it by right clicking 'my computer' clicking 'manage' and going to Disk Management, the formatting in there.

Anyone on Windows Vista or later (so, 7 or server too) should be able to have the options in My Computer > Right click > Format.

Hopefully this fixes all the issues people are having with forgetting spots on tracks and USB sticks not working.


TESTED ON:
16MB 'ROCK' USB Drive (circa 2001) - Fat16, 32KB clusters.
2GB Micro SDHC (in reader) - Fat 16, 32KB clusters
2GB Micro SDHC (in reader) - Fat 32, 32KB clusters.
8GB Sandisk Blade Cruzer - FAT32, 32KB clusters
16GB Toshiba unlabeled USB - FAT32, 32KB clusters.

All working. All happy. Music resumes within a 3 second count of starting the car.

Id like to test (but am yet to): a USB Laptop HDD, Compact Flash card (as these have their own IDE controller interface) and a Solid State Drive.

Hopefully this helps people get their non working drives to function. Let me know if some STILL dont work, as USB is standardised. For something USB to truly 'not work', means some AMAZINGLY shoddy firmware.


Scythe.

[rustynutz]

Thanks MS....I'll give what you've recommended a try next time I buy a flash drive for the car...

[Myowni30]

I will give this a try today. Fingers crossed 

[Myowni30]

Using an 8GB FAT32, 16KB clusters.

Works fine so far. Resume ok, select tracks back/forward ok, play fast forward/rewind ok.

Just noticed the way I formatted my drive is not one you show above. But none the less it works fine now but did not before I did this today.

I have the tracks directly on the root of the drive. Have not tried different folders for different albums yet.

Thanks Master_Scythe 

[Shambles]

Just reformatted my 16Gb SDHC to 64kb clusters, to see if I can raise my carcam's resolution, as with 32kb clusters the recording stutters on anything other than lowest res/lowest framerate.

Not holding out much hope, but might make a difference.

Thanks for this post, Scythe


EDIT 1: the carcam didn't like 64kb clustersize
EDIT 2: carcam took ages to start up with 4kb clustersize
EDIT 3: going to try it tomorrow with 16kb

[russgreen]

interesting post....tried it but I can't seem to make the folder navigate feature work when my stick has more than about 2gig and 200 tracks tracks on it....little point having loads of tracks on a stick if you can't select the album....is this something anyone else is experience on large drives?

[rustynutz]

I use an 8GB drive (using standard format) and pretty much full of music and the folder navigate feature works perfectly...

[Alasama]

Learned the knowledge from Master_Scythe, though I did not have the problem about USB drives. However I'll be able to make suggestion to those who have the problems.

Meanwhile, look forward to seeing the conclusion about the testing of Shambles. I'd like to learn if the theory works about the carcam video files. Shambles, please.

[Shambles]

Meanwhile, look forward to seeing the conclusion about the testing of Shambles. I'd like to learn if the theory works about the carcam video files. Shambles, please.

I'd forgotten about this thread

I settled on 16kb cluster size for my 16gb SDHC card - minimal stutter at lowest camera resolution.

Although the topic concerns USB drives it's still relevant as I plug my SDHC card into a USB adaptor (if there's anything worth keeping from my road trips) so in effect it's a large USB drive.