Hi. I bought a second hand head unit, one I had in my old coop, a Kenwood KDC-W6541u. I only used it with an iPod before, but I'm now using it with a 320GB USB Hard Drive. It is formatted as FAT32.

When I try to play my tracks, it only actually recognises the first few folders, not even all of them. I have about 50GB of songs on there, all in folders (Artist > Album > Track). Some of the first folders I can access, some I can't. 95% of them I can't access, anything below the letter 'B' in fact. I can see the artist folder name, but then can't go in and select and album or track.

Does anyone know why? What limitations are there using a USB HD rather than an iPod?

It may just be too big and its internal memory cant cope when trying to read such a large external stick ?

The Ipod controls itself, looks for its own tracks etc, so the unit wont struggle....

I have the exact same headunit and listen via USB, I have about 7GB on it, (stick is 8GB ) and it plays all the tracks faultlessly...

I'll try partitioning the drive into smaller chunks, see if that helps.

I've been doing a bit more reading up on this and think that I need a power source for the USB drive. Due to the size of the disk volume (320GB), the HU doesn't have enough to power the USB drive properly.

I may end up having to get a smaller USB stick which doesn't need the extra power as it's solid state. Unfortunately I'd need a 64GB one to hold all my songs.

For anybody else who's interested, I found the reason behind this happening.

The HU is only capable of loading 255 folders or 255 files in a folder. I had much more than that on the HD so it couldn't load them all.

More info here: http://www.kenwood.com/cs/ce/audiofile/index.php?model=KDC-W6541U&lang=english

I think it will be different for different HUs, maybe newer ones can handle more files.