• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Hard drive in car

monkey333

monkey333

Senior member
Anyone try this? I'm thing if I take a molex adapter and splice it to a cigarette adapter, it should power it. Then just get a IDE to USB adapter and I'm good to go. Thoughts?
 
You need a USB to SATA controller. This built in with every external enclosure, which also include power conversion.
You should have no problems finding an adapter to connect one of those to a car stero, simply read the amps and volts from the pin (make sure its a standard round plug and not a custom funky looking one).

Or just save some effort and get a low power USB HDD (have mercy on your car battery!) which can be powered via USB's power alone (and there IS USB power on your car stereo else the pen drives would not work with it).
Like these drives
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digita.../dp/B000RY2PLQ
 
monkey333 said:
Would this be easier with an ssd?
Click to expand...

Its already very easy. And it would be identically easy with an SSD.

An SSD will handle the vibrations in a car better; but I am not sure it will be an issue (I haven't tested it)... Just to be safe I would not use a desktop 3.5 inch drive if I went with a platter but a laptop drive, which are probably designed for more rugged environment.
The WD passport drives are laptop drives btw.

What I am saying is that you buy any drive of your choice sold as "external drive". like this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136540

Those will either be low power enough to get power over USB... those you just plug into the car and it works (make sure to format them in the correct format... probably FAT32.
Some will have a seperate power adapter brick which plugs into the AC wall outlet on one side, goes through a brick, and then gives a round plug that connects to the drive.
Those round connectors are typically standard, you should be able to find an adapter that replaces that power brick and connects to your car cig lighter on one end and outputs a circular plug with identical size, shape, and power output (both amps and volts).
 
Last edited:
You will want to use a laptop 2.5" drive. Otherwise with a desktop 3.5" drive you will need a regulated 12v power supply since when your car is running it will output 14.4v. Lucily it's DC so you only need to regulate it. Old 12v cell phone cigarette charger will work, assuming the power demand from the 3.5" HDD is low. Otherwise it will eventually burn out.

So you're really better off with a 2.5" USB laptop drive or a USB flash stick.
 
Last edited:
monkey333 said:
Anyone try this? I'm thing if I take a molex adapter and splice it to a cigarette adapter, it should power it. Then just get a IDE to USB adapter and I'm good to go. Thoughts?
Click to expand...
No. You're going to need a 12V (11-14V) to 12V+10% and 12V to 5V+10%, and I wouldn't feel safe with that unless they shared grounds. Then, you'd have to get the HDD and the adapter securely mounted.

Your best and simplest bet will be to just buy a 2.5" (5V only) USB HDD, and a USB car adapter for it to get power from (a cell phone charger that can supply more than 500mA/port would be ideal, so one of the plugs can be power, and the other data). They're big enough for large collections of lossy compressed music, these days.

An HDD will be fin in the car, as long as it is well-mounted. If you have to use the glove box, velcro tape should be fine (if you get a USB drive, get one with one of the large sides flat). I can speak from experience on this one, with whole desktop computers running in cars. I won't say any HDD will last as long as if mounted to a sturdy steel case that never moves, but if your ride isn't jarring, it won't be too much for your HDD to handle.
 
Got a 500GB WD Passport at Costco for $80. It's bus powered, so your stereo should power it fine. Otherwise get a USB Cigarette Lighter adapter for $5 from pretty much anywhere.

Velcro it to the dashboard.

That's it. No splicing, no mess. You're done.

I wouldn't leave it in the car during the sunny summer. Gets awfully hot in there.
 
The road might not always be smooth as butter. You want it to be shock/vibration proof, as much as possible. SSD/CF is the way to go for this application.
 
Last edited:
Last edited:
taltamir said:
You know what, at the amount of money you are spending, why not just buy one of those:

personally i would look more into cf or even usb drives
less power consumption than an ssd and with one of this
http://www.amazon.com/PQI-USB-2-0-Co...3377854&sr=8-1
or this
http://www.amazon.com/5-1-Card-Reade...377854&sr=8-16
you can plug it directly to usb

since it is for music you only care about capasity not transfer rates
http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Ultim...3377974&sr=1-4

will cover you
so thats 55$ for 32giga storage
which is easily upgradeable with more cf
no fancy adaptors to drain power from the cigarate lighter
no shock problems
small footprint
Click to expand...
 
anikhtos said:
cf has ecc right?
so that makes cf better solution than usb drive?
Click to expand...

Its not a server application, your not worried about losing info on RAW format photos. I see no use for read only access of information copied from a computer for ECC. I mean if he was running a mobile O/S on it, that might be useful, but ECC just because its ECC doesn't always mean a good thing.
 
taltamir said:
As undemanding as music is, is CF via a cheap USB to CF adapter even going to be fast enough for it?
Click to expand...

a cheap 133x cf thats aroudn 20mbyte/sec
kingston has replaced the models with 266x as the lowest
so thats 40Mb/sec
so how much more transfer rate you want for a music?
 
I thought the worse CFs were orders of magnitude slower than that... Thanks for correcting me.

I know USB1 will be an issue if you are limited to it.
 
Yeah the biggest advantage of CF over SD and others is the high speed parallel interface and low latency for high end rapid fire raw DSLR. An SD card would die. The slowest CF is faster than the fastest SD card.

But for music playback? A 5MB/sec SD card would be overkill. Digital music is non real time access; you only need to stream a few kilobytes per second and you can buffer. Any current media sufficient for copying a 5-10 MB music file in 1 second is plenty to stream the same data a few kilobytes per second over several minutes.

Are we confusing 100-400 kilobit per second MP3 playback with 20+ megabit 1080p playback or something?
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top