ok my 80gb ipod just took a dump and looking for something cheaper then another ipod to work w/ sync like a extrenal hard drive or something along those lines.
what devices are you using and do they work good?

 

im using an external USB powered drive by western digital. its a 500 GB. it was on sale at tigerdirect.com for around 100.00

it has temp, vibration and power monitoring , im using 60gb or so. possibly a bit more of space on it. all mp3

it catalogs all of the music . but voice commands cant be used. because there are about 15K songs on it.

it does work well. never had any issues. i put usb 2 cable in . installed jack in glove box. good to go.

have a good week.

 

I'm using a 16GB flash drive on the USB 2. The problem with that is sync can't recognize protected files (M4P) from iTunes. MP3's are not a problem. If the bulk of your music is DRM protected from iTunes, you'll need another solution or have to convert them to MP3 (which I think may be illegal).

 

16-32GB flash drive is your cheapest option. MP3s are the easiest file format to work with. Make sure all the metadata is complete (MP3Tag is great for this).

It's not illegal to convert M4Ps to MP3s. It is illegal to conver them and give them to friends.

 

I have 16gigs on a thumbdrive, from my itunes, they are labeled m4a. Had voice control for artist, album etc. until a week ago. I got a "bad media " message, unplugged the drive a few times then got "index full, some songs may not play" and lost the voice control for my Ipod. Took it to the dealer, they did a reset, now I've got voice control over my ipod and the drive will play music but I can't voice activate and can only use the **** to go to the next song on the drive. Plugged the drive into several computers and it's not corrupted. Dealer says it's my thumb drive, I thinks it's something in the usb/sync has changed. Any suggestions? How would I reformat to mp3?
Thanks.

 

using a 500 gb hard drive from fry's. cost about $50-$55 IIRC. so far it's pretty good, few issues but they are all sync related.

IIRC you meed a mini USB to go to the rear of the radio (remove upper dash cubby), a Female to female USB coupler, then the cable that will come with the hard drive or the flash drive will plug into it.

daveel, to convert to MP3 on itunes right click the song and click convert to mp3. once you do that you will have a duplicate of each song, go to file and click display duplicates and then you can delete all of your multiples. you can also have it show what format all your music is so you know what to delete. i'm on a mac so it might be different than a windows itunes.

 

External 64GB SSD. Think it's a Kingston, bought it from Newegg for ~$100. It's on USB2 in glove box.

Works excellent now that the Sync 3.2.2 update cured the glitch where it wouldn't respond to voice commands for the first several minutes of driving (it would instead say "creating speech commands" in response to any attempt to say a command such as "Play Artist Rush".)

I went SSD because I believe the consumer-grade items handle temperature extremes better than comparable magnetic hard disks. Have heard of problems with HDs in low temps/cold start. Guessing the Nav's magnetic HD is spec'ed to handle it, whereas consumer-grade HDs don't work as well.