Would a 250 GB external harddrive work on the f900? If not,what would be the max capacity?

2 GB is the max on the F-series

Basically just thumb drives, no hard disks.

does the 2gb limit also apply to SD cards?

Strange - I plugged a 30GB drive into the F900 USB to grab an image file - worked fine - I haven't tried any music though..

SD cards, the manual says it's limited to 8GB. But there are some people who use a 16GB card with no problems... so really, there's no way to know for sure if something will work or not until you try.

As for chriso... that goes for the USB port as well. The manual says 2GB max... but that doesn't mean something bigger won't work. You've just got to try it and see.

Our rep said he was using a 16GB SD card w/ no problems. No idea about USB

Just make sure your format the drive to FAT32 before you try it. Most hard drives designed for windows PC's will be formated in NTFS which the F series cannot read. This is probably the reason many people can not get it to work. I would try it myself but all my hard drives are HFS+. Every once in a while having a mac can be annoying.

i tried a 4gb Kingston thumb drive formated to fat32 yesterday, no dice. The unit would lock up and restart every 2-3 minutes untill i unpluged the drive.

i tried a 4gb Kingston thumb drive formated to fat32 yesterday, no dice. The unit would lock up and restart every 2-3 minutes untill i unpluged the drive.

i used an 8gb super talent flash drive and pulled an image file off of it with no problems.. i have no idea about the format but i didnt change anything from when i took it out of the packaging.

I have a Western Digital WD Elements 500G PnP USB drive. I put about 15gigs or so of mp3's on there, and it ran fine. It took about 3 or 4 minutes for the F900 to find it though.

I have only run this drive straight out of the box- I never had to format it. It's only been used with XP and ubuntu. It's at my office right now- I'll have to look at it to see how it's set up.

Interesting though. I wish I could power it with 12 volts. I had to use an inverter...

I bought a 32 Gb pen drive. (of course FAT32 format)

95% of the time, it doesn't recognize the Pen Drive, and when it does, it show it as empty.

I got a cheap 1 Gb (FAT16 format), and it was recognized immediately.

So I would say, it can only read FAT16 formatted USB drive... knowing FAT16 format can only goes up to 2Gb (which makes it the limit of the Avic USB connection).

I bought the F900BT mainly for this USB connection, thinking I would be able to connect my portable 80Gb hard drive... i feel cheated.

Also Pioneer claim the got the best Product 2008-2009 from EISA Award, with many theoretical functions... but most of their functions are missing on the European version of the F900BT...

(Where is the Navgate Feed Program ?? it seems not even released!)

It says right in the manual that the largest USB drive you can use is 2GB. You weren't cheated because Pioneer never promised you that an 80GB hard drive would work on the unit. You just assumed it would.

I believe the Navgate Feeds program is just about out over there. IIRC somebody showed that they already had the download page up but the link for the download wasn't operational yet.

As I said earlier, I got my 500G drive to work, with only about 5G's of music on it.

I took it out, and added all of my mp3's on it (about 20G's) and a couple of mpg's (DIVX) and tried it again. This time IT DID NOT WORK.

I have not tried to take the video off and see if that changes things, but I will one day. Also, I added music after I had music already on it. I am thinking that you may need to start clean every time, since I am having this other problem (below)

I have a Kingston 8G Thumb Drive (Datatraveler) and it's worked fine all along, until I filled it up (there is 305mb free). Now, it still works, but I have to unplug it and plug it back in AFTER the system boots up to get it to find it. Before I filled it up, I would jump in my car, and after about 20 seconds it would start playing.

The 500G drive is NTFS- It will not let me re-format to anything else.

The 8G thumb drive is FAT 32

My 2G SD card is FAT

BTW: My 2G SD card is a Micro SD. I have read in other posts that some are having problems with micro SD- some just reading music, others trying to update. I can do both with no problems. I currently have my Micro SD set up to boot Win CE- with no problems.

The SD card is Ativa, and it's connected to a micro to SD adapter.

I mess with it more and see if there is a pattern to copying items to make it more reliable...

My ADATA 2Gig MicroSD with adapter works perfectly for updates and mp3's. Video is a little jittery, but watchable.

My 60Gig WD Passport USB drive will not work. I've been "eyeing" the little 5V hole for an AC adapter... ... I already have a inverter I can run, if I have to. (Lots of good stuff on that drive... )

My generic USB thumbdrive is too slow for video...

My Kingston drive plays sound, but no video. I think I'll be trying some other files of a different codec...It may work.

It says right in the manual that the largest USB drive you can use is 2GB.

Can you please show me on the european site where is this limit written ?

Cause i see there (ex : http://www.pioneer.eu/eur/products/25/1 ... specs.html ) they talk about USB connectivity, WITHOUT any asterisk or mention of ANY limit in capacity... (honest advertising would add at least a tiny asterisk where you could read at the bottom of the page in very small font "* up to 2Gb".)

How about SD cards ? can i "assume" it will work with a 32 Gb ?

Well HiFiS, as you said above, "there's no way to know for sure if something will work or not".

Well, Customers should be informed CLEARLY (and not try out by themselves!) about the REAL capacity of the product. Pioneer should definitely improve this area.

Then I find myself looking out for all those informations... and then i realise the F900BT package lack a real COMPLETE manual.

The only manual I could find is just a tiny very basic operation guide. (less than 2 pages with lots of pictures).

Can you tell me how do i update the Radar Database ? (i GUESS i'll know when my registration on the website will be confirmed...but I don't think a user should "guess" stuff).

How do you add TTS Voices ? (I could find the button "ADD TTS" on the F900BT, but where is written where i can get those from ?

Well if you go to that link (the one you posted) and click on the "Support and Media" tab, click on the "Find manuals for AVIC-F900BT" link, it will bring up a list of user's manual in many different languages, one of which is an English version of the user's manual which is 172 pages long. On page 168 you will find where it says the USB will only support 2GB (FAT16 and FAT32) and the SD card will support 8GB (FAT16 and FAT32). I'm sure most of the other things you are talking about are also in that manual.

Ok- so I've had a little time to play with my hard drive, and got some more info.

Last time I tried to use it, I copied all of my mp3's to it, and it would not work.

Today, I reformatted it to FAT32 (using GParted), and then copied 7Gb of music to it. It worked fine. I then copied another 8GB to it, and it still worked.

I took it out and copied another 15Gb of music to it, and now it will not show up. I'm not sure if there is a bad file in one of the folders, or if I exceeded the limit, but I was able to get the unit to read about 16Gb or so on a 500Gb drive.

I'm going to try to take off the last set of folders I copied and see what happens...

Did you give it sufficient time? It seems that AVIC wants to go through every file on the drive before it will start playing it...

Well if you go to that link (the one you posted) and click on the "Support and Media" tab, click on the "Find manuals for AVIC-F900BT" link, it will bring up a list of user's manual in many different languages, one of which is an English version of the user's manual which is 172 pages long. On page 168 you will find where it says the USB will only support 2GB (FAT16 and FAT32) and the SD card will support 8GB (FAT16 and FAT32). I'm sure most of the other things you are talking about are also in that manual.

Please note he is obviously located across the pond. Does it state this on the other manuals? Not a lot of European nations speak English natively...

Im bummed out, I hooked up my f90bt earlier to find out about this limitation. Is this common for all brands? I am almost certain I read a post on a different board with someone using a western digital usb powered external drive on a kenwood unit.

What is the other option here? ...buy a large sized ipod and just stuff it in the glove box?

I have spent so much on the unit already and I still need to get the sirius parts as soon as I can afford it, but I was really jazzed up about the external drive thing.

see this post

http://avic411.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18309

thanks so much, i am going to try this.

I removed the latest set of files I copied to the drive and tried it out, and it worked fine. I then copied about 4Gb to it and tried it, and it worked. So now, I have about 20Gb working. I still have another 8 to add and my entire collection will be on there, but I'll put more on tomorrow. Then I'll try adding video. I'm just gonna have to convert all those mpeg's to avi first : (

Did you give it sufficient time? It seems that AVIC wants to go through every file on the drive before it will start playing it...

I gave it a good 20 minutes. I pluged it in when I left my house to go to work, and when I got there, still no music. Maybe if I add files little by little, it will work fine.