I searched the forum and the internet about connecting a external hard drive to this headunit but I couldn't find anything specific on how to get it to work, so I ended up figuring it out myself and I figured I would share my findings.
First the hard drive has to be formatted as FAT32 which is the only format the headunit will read and the partition Map scheme needs to be set as a "master boot record". I formatted my hard drive with a mac book pro using disk utility.
Second the Headunit doesn't put out enough power through the usb cable to run the hardrive itself so it needs an extra