Question on rigging USB drive in car

[SoulAssassin]

Short version of the story I bought a 2nd car, a 99 Wrangler, to beat up...replaced the head unit w a new Kenwood that has a external USB plug for flash drives/USB hard drives/etc. Hooked up a 1gb flash drive and it plays no problem. Hooked up an external 20GB drive (formatted FAT32) and it just says "Reading..." continuously on the display. Let it go for a while in case it was actually parsing the whole drive but still nothing. The Kenwood documentation says it provides up to 500ma but no more so I'm thinking the drive isn't getting enough power. It has two USB plugs but I usually only need one to give it enough juice.

What I was thinking about doing was getting a replacement cigarette socket like this and a cigarette->USB adapter like this (it's a PSP charger but it's USB coming off and it puts out 2amps). Take the cigarette adapter and rig the positive into the fusebox off the radio fuse (conveniently right behind the glove box where I'm keeping the drive), ground it then pop the PSP charger in the cigarette adapter.

Question is: #1 Any reason why this won't work? #2 Is there another "cleaner" way to do this? I don't want to use a splitter on the existing cigarette lighter as I want to keep everything hidden and since the fusebox is so close my solution would require running less wire.

Cliffs: new beater car
hooking USB hard drive to stereo
Scotty, I need more power!!

 

[FoBoT]

yes, for 2.5" or 3.5" hard drives you need 1000 ma or two USB ports (my external drives have two USB plugs on the end of the cable for to supply the extra current

if you go with the correct 1.8" drive, you won't have this problem. i have a couple of 20 GB 1.8" drives that will run on a single port

 

[drinkmorejava]

The reason it probably normally works for you is, many times, computers will be setup as to provide up to 2000mA(500mA is to spec) across all USB ports (ie: hooking up the power in parallel) which means you can do things like that. This also saves on production costs as only one power circuit is need for all USB ports instead of one for each.

Personally, I'd take a small 2.5:1 transformer to cut the cars 12V to 4.8V then hook it up in parallel with the power for the USB. I don't mess with cars at all, but isn't there a 5V connection for decks to plug in to anyway.

 

[SoulAssassin]

Originally posted by: drinkmorejava
Personally, I'd take a small 2.5:1 transformer to cut the cars 12V to 4.8V then hook it up in parallel with the power for the USB. I don't mess with cars at all, but isn't there a 5V connection for decks to plug in to anyway.

If I went the transformer path I would think that would be more expensive than a $3 cigarette socket. I'm not a car guy either but I don't think there's a 5v although I could be wrong.

 

[thedarkwolf]

I have two of those headunits and use my 60gig 2.5in with them. I bought a really cheap PSP usb charger dohickies and took it apart and wired it right up to 12v and then taped it back together so I wouldn't need to use a cig lighter. I ran that and the USB from the radio into my console and it works great. Need to be able to solder to rig the PSP usb charger though.

 

[SoulAssassin]

Originally posted by: thedarkwolf
I have two of those headunits and use my 60gig 2.5in with them. I bought a really cheap PSP usb charger dohickies and took it apart and wired it right up to 12v and then taped it back together so I wouldn't need to use a cig lighter. I ran that and the USB from the radio into my console and it works great. Need to be able to solder to rig the PSP usb charger though.

Nice...that sounds a little cleaner. I'm going to borrow a coworkers PSP charger and try it just plugging it into the existing lighter. Haven't had to solder anything in a long while but I still have it in my toolbox and could probably pull it off...worst case the PSP chargers are cheap.

Did you format the drive NTFS or FAT32? I have a 20 and 80GB drive and I was thinking about using the 80 although it's probably overkill. I have close to 80GB in MP3's but there's alot of B-sides/full album rips in there I wouldn't listen to. If it won't read >32GB of FAT32 I was thinking about using SwissKnife to format it.

 

[thedarkwolf]

Pretty sure the stereo can't read NTFS so its FAT32.