# External Hard Drive (option 6FL) hits new record - 1TB



## Jim E. (Apr 23, 2002)

I posted this in the X5 section but since there might be some X5 Dieselheads that like to park here, I though I might share. And no, it has nothing to do with the diesel part of your X5. But if it did, that would be odd. :yikes:

Sorry for the double post if you peruse both sections.

For those of you who like to use an external drive to play music, it appears that the X5 may accomodate 1TB drives!

I stumbled on this by accident. I have been using the Aegis minis for some time but the max size was 240gigs. They have since been discontinued.

I bought a Toshiba external USB 1TB drive just to use it as a portable for work. I had it with me one night and thought, hey WTH, why not check to see if the X5 recongnizes this drive.

I believe the general consensus was that 1.8" drives were the way to go because of the low power consumption.

This is the Toshiba and it is a 2.5" drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822149191

I plugged it in and it was immediately recognized. Put some music on and so far works great. Comes from the factory formatted in NTFS. I was surprised because I thought it would only work if the drive was formatted in FAT32.

CAVEAT: it works in my 2011 X5 which was a 12/10 build. It did NOT work in my 09 335d which was a 6/09 build. It does power it but continuoulsy says reading. I will reformat that drive to FAT32 to see if that makes a difference. But this is precisely why I posted this "discovery" in the X5 forum. I do not make any guarantees that it will work in your X5.

Since it only cost $90 for 1TB I think it's a steal. All my music is in WMA lossless so it adds up quickly.

This post in not intended to be gospel, but rather a PSA.

Cheers,
Jim


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## 62Lincoln (Sep 26, 2004)

Jim, do you know if your 12/10 build has the Combox? IIRC, E90's started getting Combox around 9/10 build dates.

I don't even know if there is a connection wrt the Combox, but your build date prodded my memory of Combox dates.


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## Jim E. (Apr 23, 2002)

62Lincoln said:


> Jim, do you know if your 12/10 build has the Combox? IIRC, E90's started getting Combox around 9/10 build dates.
> 
> I don't even know if there is a connection wrt the Combox, but your build date prodded my memory of Combox dates.


Yes i do have Combox.


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## Stugots (Jan 1, 2010)

Hrmm......I'll toss one on my 11/09 build d and see what happens.


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## DennisCooper! (Jan 29, 2011)

Hi

I'm within the car audio industry and I've often thought about large capacity hard drives like this!

There's a couple of things to think about -

1. The 'average' music collection is around 16 GB. Obviously, there'll be people like me, who have hundreds of GB and even TB's of music and others with much less. 

2. Depending on the interface, it can be extremely tedious to scroll through hundreds if not thousands of listings and the metadata etc of files on disk to display via the iDrive or interface. It's that 'usability' aspect with oem interfaces which often puts limits of the electronics and processor. That then usually results in slow scrolling of the information and makes the system sluggish in response, think of it as putting a 1.2 litre engine into a 7 series. 

Newer interfaces may well be more powerful and have and will reduce processing times and thus made the interface work quickly and smoothly, but I remain at this stage to be convinced. I think if you do indeed put 920 GB of music files on this drive, it'll slow down the responsiveness of the interface drastically.

Cheers, Dennis!


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## naamanf (Jan 24, 2011)

Jim E. said:


> Since it only cost $90 for 1TB I think it's a steal. All my music is in WMA lossless so it adds up quickly.


What are you using to encode the WMA lossless? Tried to convert some FLACs to WMA-L with DBPower amp and they were recognized but wouldn't play.


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## Jim E. (Apr 23, 2002)

naamanf said:


> What are you using to encode the WMA lossless? Tried to convert some FLACs to WMA-L with DBPower amp and they were recognized but wouldn't play.


I burn my disks directly to my windows media center. Before you do that you have to set the default rip settings in windows media player to WMA Lossless.


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## stimulus (Sep 3, 2009)

*I use foobar2000*

If you have flac files you can convert to WMA-Lossless using foobar2000. You have to configure the Converter component as follows:

Encoder = C:\Program Files\Windows Media Components\Encoder\WMCmd.vbs
Extension = wma
Parameters = -silent -a_codec WMA9LSL -a_mode 2 -a_setting Q100_44_2_16 -input %s -output %d

Format = Lossless
Highest BPS = 24 bit

Encoder name = WMA Lossless
Bitrate = blank
Settings = VBR Quality 100

do some searching in hydrogenaudio.org forums for more information.


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