Hard Drive on Avic-z110bt

[swftballz]

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 power source. I tested this using a split usb cable that comes with most 2.5" external hard drives. I plugged one into the cable to the headunit and the other into my iphone car charger that has an extra usb port on it. After doing this the headunit recognized the hard drive and I wasn't given any error messages.

 

Next I loaded some movies on it and tested out. Everything Worked. Also this hard drive is 500gig and I have well over 32gig on it. I believe the manuel says there is a limit it can read because 32 gig is the largest sd and flash drive you can buy without spending an outrageous amount of money. I also tried using a usb hub with an ipod and it worked but like what it says in the sticky about usb hubs when the vehicle is turned off and back on only one shows as connected and you have unplug it and plug it back for it to work.

 

My next project will be to wire up an extra dc plug under my console to plug the power end of the cable out of sight with the head unit plug and have only one plug coming up through the console for the hardrive.

 

Hope this helps anyone.

[VBLUE42]

Yea your only about the forth person to post this info in the last year. Good try though.

[rgarjr]

Cool find dude. What happens when you plug in the hard drive straight to the USB cable? It won't show up or what?

[swftballz]

If you plug just into the headunit it gives an error message of something like "flash drive not supported usb will be shutdown for you protection. restart unit to turn usb back on" or something like that. To be able to use the use the usb again with anything else you had to turn the unit off then back on.

[swftballz]

Yea your only about the forth person to post this info in the last year. Good try though.

I searched anything to do with hard drives and couldn't find anything.

[VBLUE42]

Yea no worries. You will find there are way too many limitations when trying to use hard drives with these units to be practical. It's much easier just to get a high capacity iPod and call it a day.