well i just picked up a slightly used f90bt for $335 shipped on ebay. its a great unit so far, i love it. the unit loads and does things pretty fast, i was scared at first looking at some of the reviews, but its a nice unit.

now the questions. i have a seagate 500gb hard drive i would love to put my music on and use with the f90BT but when i plug it in it doesnt work. im sure the hard drive is a 2 platter or something so large that the pioneer cannot spin it. i have been looking around for powered usb hubs, but i dont want to go and buy one if the hard drive wont work anyways.

also i tried to burn a dvd RW disk with a bunch of mp3s on it, and it says unsupported media, anyone know the best way to burn dvds so they work. i just burned it by copying the files to the disk with windows.

so this unit was a big leap for me. my car has intergrated climate controls and there is no aftermarket solution for the climate controls. one independent guy designed a touch screen lcd which is very expensive but works with the gmlan and controls the climate controls, but he hasnt got the newest batch in so i have to wait. my system is mostly SQ but gets pretty loud, i am very happy with the pioneer sq using the digital output directly into my bitone processor. someone said the coax digital output also works with dvd videos. but i have only got it to work with cds. HMM

What digital out?

What digital out?

i call pioneer up back when i was trying to figure out what unit to get, and they said the did away with the digital output on all their new models. they said it just was not a demand.

the one on the back of the unit. there is a 3.5mm plug that says digital out. its made to be used with the pioneer box that converts it into an optical digital output with a specialized 4 pin cable to tos link. so basically if you want to do it the pioneer way you have to buy 2 parts that end up costing about $200. non of this is needed. pioneer doesnt tell you that all the 3.5 plug is just a coax digital output. use a mono 3.5mm to rca jack, then run a 75 ohm digital coax cable to whatever processor has digital input in coax rca.

its the silver headphone looking plug next to the fan.

also it looks like a sd card is the best option for my music, i tried my 8 gig micro sd with my usb stick adapter and it took a good 3-5 minutes to load all the music. then i put my 8 gig micro sd in a sd adapter and plugged it in the face of the unit and it took less then a minute to load the music. so it looks like i will be asking for some sdhc cards for christmas.

Hmm, interesting. I dont think I ever noticed that was even there.

any ideas if a large external 2.5 hdd will work if i power it with a hub or something.

now the challange is finding a usb hub that will work. all usb hubs use 5 volt and finding a powerful enough 12 - 5 volt conveter is hard to do. and 12 volt usb hubs are expensive. hmmmm, i really dont need a hub. i just need a power booster. maybe i will look into a external 2.5" hard drive case that has a power input.

This has all been tried before and deemed not worth the trouble.

i will give it a try when i get home with a booster cable, once that draws power from 2 usb ports and see how it works. if not i will just be buying some 32gb sdhc cards.