# Woo Hoo! Finally happy with MDI hard drive.



## sfletcher (May 26, 2008)

I purchased a 120 GIG Western Digital drive from Newegg.com ($25.00) to use in the MDI on my 2011 CC. It worked well,_except_ it would lose its place and start over at the first song on the drive each time I opened the door - crap.

I thought this was just an MDI issue but I picked up a Toshiba 500 gig drive on clearance at Best Buy for $63 and with this drive the MDI always remembers where it was playing when I return to my car!

So, my wife now gets the 120 GIG drive as a backup for her netbook and I get 500 Gigs of music space to play with.

I have about 7700 songs on there so far and room for hundreds of thousands more.

Steve


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## f.rizzo (Jun 29, 2008)

Cool.
Did you just put it in an enclosure and plug it into the USB port? I thought it would need a power supply?


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## Szy_szka (Aug 26, 2010)

If this is 2.5" drive in an enclosure (I cannot imagine the OP is talking about a 3.5" drive) then you do no need a separate power source. USB is all that you would need to get such drive powered up.


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## Skwiddly (Sep 10, 2010)

Sorry for a noob question, but how does this work? I am interested in having a large library in my car, but I have no clue how to go about such an addition. Where did you put the hdd and how is it connected?


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## sfletcher (May 26, 2008)

f.rizzo said:


> Cool.
> Did you just put it in an enclosure and plug it into the USB port? I thought it would need a power supply?


I used an external USB drive that was already in a small case. It is mini-USB cable powered so I purchased the VW mini USB MDI cable - 000 051 446 A from my local VW parts counter. Plug in the single cable and all is well.


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## sfletcher (May 26, 2008)

Skwiddly said:


> Sorry for a noob question, but how does this work? I am interested in having a large library in my car, but I have no clue how to go about such an addition. Where did you put the hdd and how is it connected?


I have the MDI interface in my glovebox in my 2011 CC Lux with RNS315 Nav system. There is a slot inside the glove box sized for an ipod. I just loaded the hard drive with a few thousand MP3 files, slid it in to the opening for the ipod and connected the min-usb adapter cable that I purchased from through VW parts.

I don't think this would work without the MDI adapter and USB cable. My adapter is in the top of the glove box. There is a small orange tag hanging down with a music note printed on it. Pulling this tag brings down the MDI interface. My car came with an iPod cable so I purchased the USB mini-cable separately.

Steve


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## sfletcher (May 26, 2008)

Skwiddly said:


> Sorry for a noob question, but how does this work? I am interested in having a large library in my car, but I have no clue how to go about such an addition. Where did you put the hdd and how is it connected?


I realize that I didn't make this clear - the MDI is a VW part that came installed on my 2011 CC. It is available for some other models depending on what stereo you have. Google for VW MDI for more info.


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## jpbran (May 18, 2008)

If this is an actual hard drive (spinning motor, platter, etc.) and not a flash drive of some kind -- at that price, I'm guessing not -- you'll need to be careful with extreme cold OR hot temps. 

(wasn't clear if you're leaving it in the car, or just bringing it with you)


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## sergiommms (Oct 17, 2008)

jpbran said:


> If this is an actual hard drive (spinning motor, platter, etc.) and not a flash drive of some kind -- at that price, I'm guessing not -- you'll need to be careful with extreme cold OR hot temps.
> 
> (wasn't clear if you're leaving it in the car, or just bringing it with you)



I tried using a 2.5" HDD with a USB enclosure, connected to the MDI, but experienced 2 problems:
- It got really really hot (even when I started leaving it not really inside the MDI but in the actual cooled glovebox
- I had to unplug and replug it everytime I got into the car, since it wasn´t recognized at all after shutdown (and leaving the car for a while)
Those were 2 very strong reasons that made me give it up...


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## sfletcher (May 26, 2008)

jpbran said:


> If this is an actual hard drive (spinning motor, platter, etc.) and not a flash drive of some kind -- at that price, I'm guessing not -- you'll need to be careful with extreme cold OR hot temps.
> 
> (wasn't clear if you're leaving it in the car, or just bringing it with you)



It is an actual hard drive and I don't plan on removing it from the car very often. It is in the same environment my laptop travels in and I haven't had issues with my laptop hard drive.


But... if it causes problems I have an 8 gig SD card for backup with only a few hundred hours of music on it.

Steve


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## sfletcher (May 26, 2008)

sergiommms said:


> I tried using a 2.5" HDD with a USB enclosure, connected to the MDI, but experienced 2 problems:
> - It got really really hot (even when I started leaving it not really inside the MDI but in the actual cooled glovebox
> - I had to unplug and replug it everytime I got into the car, since it wasn´t recognized at all after shutdown (and leaving the car for a while)
> Those were 2 very strong reasons that made me give it up...


We'll see how the temperature goes I guess. It has never felt warm to the touch yet, but I've only been using it for 2 days. My previous WD USB drive was recognized after shutdown but was still losing where it was. The Toshiba drive has no issue.

I think it may have to do with the speed in spinning up the drive.

Steve


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## mntbighker (Aug 7, 2005)

*SSD*

Personally, I think a 2.5 inch SSD (flash) drive is a better idea in a car environment. They are getting pretty affordable. Of course I would also like to use my DroidX as MDI media but it refuses to work.


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## arkijak (Jun 15, 2010)

What does the screen look like when you connect the hard drive? What disk format did you use? Are there play options- genre, playlist, etc?


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## kimchi29 (Sep 15, 2008)

using a hard drive is it slow to seek and search like the ipod?


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## mntbighker (Aug 7, 2005)

arkijak said:


> What does the screen look like when you connect the hard drive? What disk format did you use? Are there play options- genre, playlist, etc?


I don't think any MDI source but iPod/iPone will give you genre, playlists or quality random play. Because it's the iPod/iPhone itself providing that. The manual says only FAT16 and FAT32 are supported formats as far as I recall.


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## sfletcher (May 26, 2008)

mntbighker said:


> I don't think any MDI source but iPod/iPone will give you genre, playlists or quality random play. Because it's the iPod/iPhone itself providing that. The manual says only FAT16 and FAT32 are supported formats as far as I recall.


I use a Toshiba usb drive and it does not give genre but playlists and random play seem to work. I created the playlists with media monkey. Fat 32 formatted and pretty fast except when doing random on 700 songs in a single folder.

Also, although there is no genre, I split the files in to folder by genre, including my favorite -- "geezer rock". There so much room on the 500 gig drive that I have another folder with all of the music in alphabetical order by song and then a set of folder by genre and by artists/album. Great stuff.


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## sfletcher (May 26, 2008)

arkijak said:


> What does the screen look like when you connect the hard drive? What disk format did you use? Are there play options- genre, playlist, etc?


The screen looks just like it does with an SD card. You can choose any folder on the hard drive and play, including sub folders. I think I am 4-5 sub-folders deep. I formatted FAT32 using a utility I downloaded from a freeware web site. 

There are no play options other than play folder and mix, but with 500 gigs of space you can have a genre folder with subfolders for each genre, an artist folder with subfolders for each artist, etc.


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## sfletcher (May 26, 2008)

kimchi29 said:


> using a hard drive is it slow to seek and search like the ipod?


Seek is much faster than my ipod. When changing folders there is sometimes a 2 second delay while it reads files and sometimes it is instant. I found my iPod almost unusable it is so slow.

The SD Card (class 6) is certainly faster though. Everything is immediate.

Steve

Edited to add: I have one folder of my "favorites" all together with no sub folder and there are about 750 songs in that single folder. Sometimes when starting the car after a stop I get an "MDI initializing" message for about 30-40 seconds and then play continues from where I shut off the car. Other times the music starts right up with about a 1 second delay. Because of the occasional long delay I won't use this folder often but it is useful to quickly locate any song by title without having to worry about artist name or genre to dig for it. If I want "Creep" to play, I enter this folder, use my finger to slide the bar at the left of the display down to what would appear to be the "C" portion of the list and let go then scroll up/down to find the song in alphabetical order. This is on an RNS315 and the interface allows quickly scrolling up and down like that.


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## martyk (Nov 22, 1999)

sfletcher said:


> The screen looks just like it does with an SD card. You can choose any folder on the hard drive and play, including sub folders. I think I am 4-5 sub-folders deep. I formatted FAT32 using a utility I downloaded from a freeware web site.
> 
> There are no play options other than play folder and mix, but with 500 gigs of space you can have a genre folder with subfolders for each genre, an artist folder with subfolders for each artist, etc.




I did this too, I made subfolders with all the variations I'd want, genre, specific artist, playlist. Seems to work fine. Just made for more work setting it up.


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## KwestJones (May 13, 2011)

*which radio?*



martyk said:


> I did this too, I made subfolders with all the variations I'd want, genre, specific artist, playlist. Seems to work fine. Just made for more work setting it up.


First post...I know this is am old thread but I was curious which radio this is working on. I have '12 CC Lux with the rns315 and when I plug my USB hard drive I get nothing. When I select it via the menus it says its not available.

I have a 500GB hard drive from the shack. I see the light on the hard drive come on but it doesn't read the drive.

Thanks for any help or suggestions.


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## ucantccme (Mar 16, 2011)

The 2012 glove box is vented, ports in the back that open for ac cooling. Not sure if this was a feature on pre 2012's.


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## ElectricCo (Jul 19, 2001)

i had a 250 western digital drive. had about 30gb of music on it sorted by artist-album-track. the mix option would only mix artists A-S. T-Z would not be included in the shuffle. very weird... 

Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk


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## sfletcher (May 26, 2008)

KwestJones said:


> First post...I know this is am old thread but I was curious which radio this is working on. I have '12 CC Lux with the rns315 and when I plug my USB hard drive I get nothing. When I select it via the menus it says its not available.
> 
> I have a 500GB hard drive from the shack. I see the light on the hard drive come on but it doesn't read the drive.


I am the OP and my hard drive is on a 2011 CC Lux with rns315. The hard drive must be formatted as FAT32. By default, larger hard drives come formatted as NTFS. Do a Google search for hard drive FAT32 format utility to get a program to format the drive as FAT32. Windows will not format large drives to fat 32 by itself.

Once it is formatted FAT32 I bet it will read it fine. Mine has been working for 6 months now with no issues at all and I use it more than an hour each day.


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## sfletcher (May 26, 2008)

ElectricCo said:


> i had a 250 western digital drive. had about 30gb of music on it sorted by artist-album-track. the mix option would only mix artists A-S. T-Z would not be included in the shuffle. very weird...
> 
> Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk


I finally gave up on the "one big folder alphabetical" and split it into A-C, D-F, etc. so the startup time is very fast again and I can random the entire folder. I can still easily find any particular song and I find passengers enjoy drilling down looking for favorites too.


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## sfletcher (May 26, 2008)

ucantccme said:


> The 2012 glove box is vented, ports in the back that open for ac cooling. Not sure if this was a feature on pre 2012's.


My 2011 also has the cooled/heated glove box. I don't think the temperature is that big of a deal anyway as the hard drive says it will operate from -40F t 140F and the RNS510 has a built in hard drive from the factory.


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## md5mike (Sep 6, 2010)

sfletcher said:


> RNS510 has a built in hard drive from the factory.



Can someone with this give us the make/model of the drive used from the factory?


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## UMJonny (Dec 7, 2009)

i would love to do this. However, these head units don't decode AAC (MP4). My entire library is MP4...


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