Hard Drive in the USB port -- poor design; Toyota, please fix, it's easy!

I have a 250GB SATA drive plugged in to the USB port (in this enclosure -- I like these because it doesn't require a second plug to power the drive!) and technically speaking, it works fine for the most part, but a number of things that would be EASY FIXES to the firmware that Toyota could introduce make the system nearly unusable.

Discussion, and some things I've learned, in case they're useful to anyone:

1. Not only does the drive have to be FAT32, it must only contain one partition. (Windows will not create a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB, but you can get a free tool to do so here, or use any of the Linux tools widely available.) Fine, I can live with that.

2. The player doesn't know anything about folder hierarchies; it just lists all folders including subfolders all together. This is a pain because I have folders not intended to be seen in isolation... for example I have 20-30 folders named "CD1" and another 20-30 named "CD2"...which I have to open up and look in to find out what they contain. A full reorganization of the folders on this drive is now underway... Alternatively, Toyota could put together a hierarchical UI to use the folders like God and Ken Thompson intended.

3. The order of folders is *at best* the order of the folders on disk, not alphabetically or by anything useful, and you cannot reorder the folders on the display. To reorder them on the disk you can find free utilities on the web (I use DriveSort, but there are others.) How hard would it be to add a button to reorganize the folders you see on the car??

4. Too many folders confuses its little brain. I have over 500 folders and the car recognizes only 300+ of them. There's no message indicating that some folders aren't in your list; it takes two or three cycles through the list before you realize the one you're looking for isn't there... a simple message saying "Capacity exceeded, you geeky twit" would be useful.

5. (The Killer: ) In order to permit voice recognition, when it first sees the drive it goes through the entire partition and generates a list of folders and a soundex (or similar, I haven't seen the tech details) database of all the tags in all the files on the disk. This can take ten minutes or more on my large drive -- and during that time you cannot even look through the folders manually!

And if that weren't bad enough: IT DOESN'T CACHE THIS INFORMATION. IT REGENERATES IT EVERY TIME YOU START THE CAR. So for the first ten minutes of every trip, I essentially can't use the USB drive other than to continue listening to what I was listening to when the car stopped last.

How hard would it be to write a little file like Microsoft's .thumbs or Apple's ._DS-Store (or whatever it is) so you can just reread the db at the next startup? Check the timestamp on the file against the timestamp of the directory it's in to see whether you need to refresh that dir or not. Processing time would be cut by 95% (and thus save power in the car!) and you could listen to your stuff in a few seconds.

All this stuff would be a matter for a couple of weeks' work for one or two programmers and it would make the USB experience light-years better. I'd even help write it if they exposed their API to me. In the meantime, anybody with similar ideas can use a large drive but don't expect it to be fun.

 

Guess I'm pickier than that...
Any programmer today should consider scalability in their design. We are, after all, on computers (even head units) with more than 640k... that should be enough lesson for anybody. And a car that's supposed to last a dozen years? That's an eternity in the computer world. By the time this car's ready to be traded in, the USB port will feel like an 8-track tape.

 

Uh... more.

Complete Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven collections. A good swing at Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Bob Marley. The complete Springsteen. The Beatles. DJ Tiesto. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong and a bunch of their friends. Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Blue Man Group.

Y'know.... stuff.

Yeah, I'll probably end up doing that. Pity. I was really psyched about being able to cart around that drive...

 

Even USB stick drives are only getting larger. You can already get them at half-terabyte sizes (Kingston DataTraveler HyperX Predator USB flash drive - 512 GB) and that trend isn't going to reverse itself...

And if you read the post, size isn't the only issue. For example, if I have a couple of operas on one stick, with subfolders CD1, CD2, CD3, I see all the CD1 directories (no clue which opera each is from), then all the CD2's, etc.

The point is, there was zero thought put into this unit. It would take a trivial amount of effort to make it dramatically better, whether it's a stick or a hard drive.

 

You can plug it into a DC power supply as another poster suggested or you can look for an enclosure that doesn't require that extra power. I do the latter, for example this one (there are others as well.) The requirements for a notebook-sized HD (2.5 inches) are right on the edge of what USB can supply, so some smaller enclosures manage to not require a separate power input.

 

[geek]
This isn't a sort. Each folder has an area in the folder which is the "directory" which lists all of the files. As a file (or folder) is added to a directory, it is placed in the next available slot in the directory. What you are getting is the entries in this directory in the order they were placed, i.e. explicitly not re-sorted.

When you copy a directory or set of them, it will also not bother to sort them, and just reproduce them in the order they were in the original directory. So copying a directory from one place to another will not result in a sorted directory.
[/geek]

I recently got an update to the nav unit, which has paid off in at least one useful nav-related way, but I don't know if it has changed any of the music stuff. I will check when there is time and post the results here.