Hard drive in car

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taltamir

Lifer
Mar 21, 2004
13,576
6
76
Yeah the biggest advantage of CF over SD

... this entire discussion I was confusing CF for SD. 2 hours of sleep. Sorry.

Are we confusing 100-400 kilobit per second MP3 playback with 20+ megabit 1080p playback or something?
No confusion.

400kbit is for mp3s... there are higher quality formats like FLAC.... which can compress a 80 minute audio CD to about 450MB so that comes out to... math math... 0.75 mbps.

And I am merely unsure on if an SD card can do that. (and accidentally confusing CF for SD)
 
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anikhtos

Senior member
May 1, 2011
289
1
0
... this entire discussion I was confusing CF for SD. 2 hours of sleep. Sorry.


No confusion.

400kbit is for mp3s... there are higher quality formats like FLAC.... which can compress a 80 minute audio CD to about 450MB so that comes out to... math math... 0.75 mbps.

And I am merely unsure on if an SD card can do that. (and accidentally confusing CF for SD)
well sd is not thad bad
sandisk have sdhc cards with 15mb/sec capability
running hdtune having the sdhc in a usb reader i get 18mb/sec read speeds not bad access time 0.8 sec
but for the same money you can get a faster cf
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 19.373 MB/s
Sequential Write : 8.896 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 18.728 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 0.528 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 3.797 MB/s [ 927.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 2.305 MB/s [ 562.7 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 3.989 MB/s [ 974.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.000 MB/s [ 0.0 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [G: 0.0% (0.1/7572.0 MB)] (x1)
Date : 2012/04/03 0:27:30
OS : Windows 7 Home Premium Edition [6.1 Build 7600] (x64)
Sandisk ultra class 4 15mb/s
i stoped the test as it seemed to crash at last test
but never the less the speed at reading are not bad nowdays
but cf numbers are by far better
 
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monkey333

Senior member
Apr 20, 2007
785
5
81
Sorry for getting back so late on this. I've got 75ish g of music ATM. I'd like to be a little forward thinging and shoot for something like 120 g. by the time I fill that up, I can upgrade. on the note of USB powered HD's, I found this.
http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Canvio...412841&sr=1-12

As a side note, i have a zune 120 with all my music on it, but my sequoia does not see it in it's usb devices. The manual only talks of flash drives or ipods.

Further reading says it's a fat 32 issue. the stereo wants to see this and the zune isnt fat. any links for reformatting the zune to fat 32?
 
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Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
33
86
OK, getting OT, here...
Sequential Read : 19.373 MB/s
Sequential Write : 8.896 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 18.728 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 0.528 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 3.797 MB/s [ 927.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 2.305 MB/s [ 562.7 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 3.989 MB/s [ 974.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.000 MB/s [ 0.0 IOPS]
The bolded values are just strange, to me. Excellent random 4K write (I wish you could buy SDHC with guaranteed minimum random performance, instead of useless sequential), but what's with the 512K?
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
33
86
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anikhtos

Senior member
May 1, 2011
289
1
0
Sorry for getting back so late on this. I've got 75ish g of music ATM. I'd like to be a little forward thinging and shoot for something like 120 g. by the time I fill that up, I can upgrade. on the note of USB powered HD's, I found this.
http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Canvio...412841&sr=1-12

As a side note, i have a zune 120 with all my music on it, but my sequoia does not see it in it's usb devices. The manual only talks of flash drives or ipods.

Further reading says it's a fat 32 issue. the stereo wants to see this and the zune isnt fat. any links for reformatting the zune to fat 32?
yes i was going to tell you that
that propably the device recognise fat32 thats why it list the hard drive out of support
well if you have a win98 cd you can format the drive to fat32
thank you microsoft for limiting fat32 at winxp only to 32 giga
why on earth microsoft done that!?!?!?
 

anikhtos

Senior member
May 1, 2011
289
1
0
No, it's 512K, and it aught to be much higher than 4K. If the last test crashes, I hadn't thought of it until now, but I wonder if there's something wrong w/ his reader? I've had a few DX ones go south on me.

Also, if interested, here's a nice collection of user results, with various cards, after they realized that a ton of SD cards suck for being home to a desktop OS.
hello as you see in the collection others also score the same with sandisc
when it comes to write the sdhc goes hmmmmmmmmm awfull

but i think it is more fault of the usb reader
unfortunetly i am not at home at the moment and i can not use my best card reader
which is sata interface
with that reader my cf card133x with theoretical max speed of 20mb/s
scored 40mb/sec!!!!!
i think the usb to sata is killing the cards especially in write operations
 

anikhtos

Senior member
May 1, 2011
289
1
0
No, it's 512K, and it aught to be much higher than 4K. If the last test crashes, I hadn't thought of it until now, but I wonder if there's something wrong w/ his reader? I've had a few DX ones go south on me.

Also, if interested, here's a nice collection of user results, with various cards, after they realized that a ton of SD cards suck for being home to a desktop OS.
lets see the results are from a ramdrive on the same system
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 4020.100 MB/s
Sequential Write : 5484.543 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 3970.319 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 5338.078 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 514.879 MB/s [125702.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 412.396 MB/s [100682.5 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 985.399 MB/s [240575.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 712.945 MB/s [174058.9 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [G: 0.0% (0.0/3064.0 MB)] (x1)
Date : 2012/04/03 9:47:52
OS : Windows 7 Home Premium Edition [6.1 Build 7600] (x64)
Ramdrive
the results are from the hdd
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 48.844 MB/s
Sequential Write : 46.305 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 24.871 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 9.175 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.407 MB/s [ 99.3 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 0.267 MB/s [ 65.3 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.745 MB/s [ 182.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 0.224 MB/s [ 54.8 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [S: 86.4% (318.1/368.1 GB)] (x1)
Date : 2012/04/02 21:25:15
OS : Windows 7 Home Premium Edition [6.1 Build 7600] (x64)
Harde drive

for one strange reason the crystal disk mark scores too low at write
so any suggestions???
only at ramdrive it agains have a strange behavior and writes are better than reads
so is something wrong setup with my system??
is crystal mark malfunction?
both hdd and schc scores are loosy at writes
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
33
86
for one strange reason the crystal disk mark scores too low at write
so any suggestions???
Get a RAID 10 of Intel 520 drives :).

Writes being slower than reads is perfectly normal. It was that seq > 512K >> 4K wasn't the pattern I thought was odd.
 

KingFatty

Diamond Member
Dec 29, 2010
3,034
1
81
Sorry for getting back so late on this. I've got 75ish g of music ATM. I'd like to be a little forward thinging and shoot for something like 120 g.

If you want to be forward thinking, I suggest copying your entire music to cloud storage, then using a network device such as a cell phone to have easy access to everything, everywhere.

Have you tried Google music + Android cell phone? The beauty of using the cloud is you don't have to worry about a crashed hard drive, or whether you've copied your recent purchases to the hard drive - all your music is available everywhere. And the phone will cache things automatically for when you have no signal, or you can manually tell it to cache songs/albums you want. Have you seen the price of 32GB microSD cards?

You can cache a good chunk of music with that for like $25, and there are even bigger microSDXC available that store up to 2TB! I mean, you buy a hard drive now, and it's like living in 2004. But use the cloud now, and you are living in star trek. Then, next year when you upgrade your phone to a model that supports microSDXC, BAM! you throw in a 2TB memory card IN YOUR PHONE and just tell the phone to cache your ENTIRE MUSIC COLLECTION AUTOMATICALLY!

Sorry for being over-dramatic, but I think it's a fair compromise to use your phone and dock it with your car to access your entire music collection using a combination of network storage (google music), local caching (32GB microSD card), and network streaming (how about Pandora or Spotify to boot? can't do that with a hard drive...), with future option of easily converting the phone to microSDXC to cache everything locally to the phone without lifting a finger. Plus, if you go for a jog, just grab some headphones and bring ALL OF THE MUSIC all the time everywhere. That's the future...

From wikipedia:
"In September 2011, SanDisk released a 64 GB microSDXC card.[23] Kingmax released a comparable product in 2011.[24]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroSDXC#SDXC
 

anikhtos

Senior member
May 1, 2011
289
1
0
If you want to be forward thinking, I suggest copying your entire music to cloud storage, then using a network device such as a cell phone to have easy access to everything, everywhere.

Have you tried Google music + Android cell phone? The beauty of using the cloud is you don't have to worry about a crashed hard drive, or whether you've copied your recent purchases to the hard drive - all your music is available everywhere. And the phone will cache things automatically for when you have no signal, or you can manually tell it to cache songs/albums you want. Have you seen the price of 32GB microSD cards?

You can cache a good chunk of music with that for like $25, and there are even bigger microSDXC available that store up to 2TB! I mean, you buy a hard drive now, and it's like living in 2004. But use the cloud now, and you are living in star trek. Then, next year when you upgrade your phone to a model that supports microSDXC, BAM! you throw in a 2TB memory card IN YOUR PHONE and just tell the phone to cache your ENTIRE MUSIC COLLECTION AUTOMATICALLY!

Sorry for being over-dramatic, but I think it's a fair compromise to use your phone and dock it with your car to access your entire music collection using a combination of network storage (google music), local caching (32GB microSD card), and network streaming (how about Pandora or Spotify to boot? can't do that with a hard drive...), with future option of easily converting the phone to microSDXC to cache everything locally to the phone without lifting a finger. Plus, if you go for a jog, just grab some headphones and bring ALL OF THE MUSIC all the time everywhere. That's the future...

From wikipedia:
"In September 2011, SanDisk released a 64 GB microSDXC card.[23] Kingmax released a comparable product in 2011.[24]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroSDXC#SDXC

only we talk for sdhc not micro which is always smaller in capasity and the speed is worse
and from price perfomance cf is unbeatable
usb have risen to 128giga
so there are posibilities apart a hard drive
or cloud
cloud means connection to net
and second you pay by the year so the cheaper is under question
how much per year for the cloud
and how much to acces it by a cell phone will cost per year???
over here mobile internet is expensive do not know how much it cost over there
 

KingFatty

Diamond Member
Dec 29, 2010
3,034
1
81
Some interesting points, I'll answer from my own experience with google music:

only we talk for sdhc not micro which is always smaller in capasity and the speed is worse

The speed is not at issue - I'm not sure how speed would become a factor for playing music files? The playback for music cached to a slow microSD card begins immediately when you press play, so what do you mean about speed?

and from price perfomance cf is unbeatable
usb have risen to 128giga
so there are posibilities apart a hard drive
or cloud

For music playback, where speed is not the critical factor, I think price per storage becomes more important, so I think the price of microSD is better than CF for a given capacity, especially when you find that CF is not readable by a lot of devices now and in the future - investing in CF seems to me as a backward step, not future-looking. If you get a new cell phone next year, it won't fit a CF card.

cloud means connection to net
and second you pay by the year so the cheaper is under question
how much per year for the cloud

Free. You can use the cloud without using the network, by initially uploading 20,000 of your music files to google music for free using your computer using a wired/LAN connection. then, connect to the network on your phone using WiFi while you are still at home, and cache what you can fit on the phone to fill up your microSD card. Then, you can play all of that "cloud" music wherever you go, without ever using the network. So in this case, he can use 32GB of his collection of 75GB at a time, nearly half his collection at once.

It just gets better when he turns on mobile/3G/4G/LTE networking on the phone to access everything, or waits and gets a new phone that supports microSDXC cards to fit all the music. You also can configure google music to limit itself to only use WiFi, to avoid any network charges. However, I have unlimited network access through Sprint cell phone provider, so I can access all my collection whereever, but I find that most of my music is already cached to my phone and there is no streaming involved, unless I find an obscure song I haven't listened to. But I like that I have the choice, I can get any song in my collection whenever I want. Even I played some children's song for my daughter, never thought I would do that and I hadn't planned ahead, but with google music on the cloud I just pulled it up very easily. Now it's cached on my phone too.

and how much to acces it by a cell phone will cost per year???
over here mobile internet is expensive do not know how much it cost over there

Yes, I sympathize, and you can make google music to never use your mobile internet, making sure you only stream music when on Wifi, and once you listen to it, it is saved on your phone so you can keep listening to it after that. Or, you can ask the phone to cache the music ahead of time.

so it's still a good idea, even if 1) you don't have mobile internet, and 2) your phone can't store your entire music collection at the same time, because you can pre-cache the music on the phone, and phones get bigger memory. But, if you have mobile internet, even better, as you can listen to all your music everywhere.

My own experience was pretty liberating, and google music lets you keep 20,000 songs for free, and their limit is based on the number of songs, not the total file size. If you exceed that, you just pay some fee. right now I'm using it for free as I only had around 7,000 songs to put on. But I'm so happy of not having to deal with the tired hassle when I buy new music, because I don't have add it to my hard drive, then back it up, then synch it to my phone and other MP3 players, etc. etc. You just buy it, put it on google, and play anywhere.

I just think that it's so nice to dock my phone in my car and listen through the car sound system, that's the future as cars are now coming with built-in controls to control the phone playback! Also, another killer feature is listening to audiobooks, podcasts, or other internet audio in the car.

If you get just a hard drive, it's a pain in the butt to keep uploading new fresh content each week when the new podcast comes out or you get a new book. Unlike music, that audio stuff gets stale quick and you don't just keep it around to listen to again. So that alone would make me hesitant to invest in a hard drive system, unless it somehow interfaces with your phone or can update itself without needing the hassle of synchronizing all the audio files over and over again as that gets old.
 

taltamir

Lifer
Mar 21, 2004
13,576
6
76
Sorry for getting back so late on this. I've got 75ish g of music ATM.

Honestly if I were you I would buy a 64GB USB Drive for 55$ and make due. Fitting most but not all of my music on it.

Then upgrade sometime in the future when price on the 128 drives goes down (since 200$ is obscene).
 

Topweasel

Diamond Member
Oct 19, 2000
5,437
1,659
136
Sorry for getting back so late on this. I've got 75ish g of music ATM. I'd like to be a little forward thinging and shoot for something like 120 g. by the time I fill that up, I can upgrade. on the note of USB powered HD's, I found this.
http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Canvio...412841&sr=1-12

As a side note, i have a zune 120 with all my music on it, but my sequoia does not see it in it's usb devices. The manual only talks of flash drives or ipods.

Further reading says it's a fat 32 issue. the stereo wants to see this and the zune isnt fat. any links for reformatting the zune to fat 32?

Actually I think it might be FAT. But it isn't a mass storage device that can use generic drivers, so unless the device is made to support it (include drivers and embedded software interface) then it isn't going to work. So you need Mass or removable storage compatible device that you can format in FAT32. It doesn't need to be the fastest in the world or have any kind of parity.

Which means it can be anything but a ipod, Zune, win7p or iphone. Well the Mac stuff might work because a lot of stereo's are making sure they have the back end to support them.
 

Concillian

Diamond Member
May 26, 2004
3,751
8
81
The OP has already figured it out, but many 2.5" external drives run from the USB 500ma / 5v power.

They're basically external enclosures that have special firmware to spin up / seek more slowly so they never pull more than the USB power can transmit.

I would tend to prefer a large piece of flash, but when you can get a 320GB USB powered drive for << $100 and a 128GB USB drive is ~$200 you can see an argument for the USB powered HDD.
 

anikhtos

Senior member
May 1, 2011
289
1
0
The OP has already figured it out, but many 2.5" external drives run from the USB 500ma / 5v power.

They're basically external enclosures that have special firmware to spin up / seek more slowly so they never pull more than the USB power can transmit.

I would tend to prefer a large piece of flash, but when you can get a 320GB USB powered drive for << $100 and a 128GB USB drive is ~$200 you can see an argument for the USB powered HDD.

the only way we suggested a flash drive was about the fear how long a drive will last using it in a moving vechicle.
so usb was a logical solution
then op told how much music he has
 

corkyg

Elite Member | Peripherals
Super Moderator
Mar 4, 2000
27,370
240
106
Just curious . . . HDDs have been factory optional equipment in cars for about 10 years now. What drives do they use? What is their warranty replacement experience?
 

anikhtos

Senior member
May 1, 2011
289
1
0
Just curious . . . HDDs have been factory optional equipment in cars for about 10 years now. What drives do they use? What is their warranty replacement experience?
well if you can have a good housing with some short of shock absorpion
that surely wil be good in a car enviroment
but i do not expect them to last that long
my experiense with protable hdd is not that good either died so soon :-(
 

Concillian

Diamond Member
May 26, 2004
3,751
8
81
Just curious . . . HDDs have been factory optional equipment in cars for about 10 years now. What drives do they use? What is their warranty replacement experience?

If you check the carputer websites/forums, people have had off-the-shelf 3.5" drives in their car for years. Laptop drives are more rugged, but most cars won't see any problems with a normal hard drive.

In this case, a laptop drive is good for the low power requirement since it can be powered by the USB connector and that is way more convenient than kludging together some sort of 5v + 12v power supply. The extra shock resistance is just a bonus.
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
33
86
my experiense with protable hdd is not that good either died so soon :-(
I don't know of any external retail drive with any form of protection. WD used to make a couple good 3.5" external cases, but they haven't for a couple years, now. Firmly mounted in a car, the HDD is unlikely to, outside of a vehicular collision, experience the kind of impulse that an HDD will receive from a drop of several inches onto a hard surface. I guess there isn't a market for reliable ones. I would think that silicone rubber, buna, or medium-hard rubber mounts, even thin ones, would do wonders for external HDD longevity.
 
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KingFatty

Diamond Member
Dec 29, 2010
3,034
1
81
So just an update, the phone I plan to buy http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/04/htc-evo-4g-lte-preview-video/ includes 16GB of storage and expandable with microSDHC, so I could buy a 32GB microSDHC card off the shelf today for less than $30 and get 48GB total.

Though that's still less than the target capacity, I wonder if another phone will include more internal storage, like 32GB internal, plus 32GB microSDHC, then you'd be even closer at 64GB, yet not need to worry about the newer storage formats and have lots of cheap 32GB cards to choose from today.

As for hard drive option, I think a laptop hard drive would be fine in a car, as I think the bumps and jolts that a laptop gets just sitting on your lap if you move around a bit, is about the same or worse than what you get in a car because the car has nice suspension to cushion the sharp blows. However, maybe you can find some kind of mount that factory installed hard drives use, and buy just that mount and use it for your system.