Will a sold state USB hard drive work for music on USB connection?

[artsci]

I've been using a Oyen Digital U32 Shadow 1TB USB hard drive to play all of my music files on my car's sound system. It seems to have failed today. It has no power and is not recognized by the car or my several computers. So I'm in danger of losing nearly 1TB of files. Fortunately I backed many of them up.

I'm thinking of replacing the Oyen device with Samsung T1 Portable 1 TB USB 3.0 External SSD. As it's solid state all the jostling in the car should not be nearly the potential problem that a traditional disc drive presents.

I can't imagine why a SSD USB drive wouldn't work, but before I spend the money I wanted to check here to verify.

 

[Rockster]

I use an SSD drive in an aluminum, bus powered enclosure from Other World Computing and it works perfectly. Way better than my spindle drive did.

 

[iadbound]

Artsci,

What's happening here??? We come to you for all the answers, not vice versa! It's a sad day. :wink:

 

[ra-san]

I'm sure it'd work. I use an actual spinning disk 2.5" usb hard drive in the car and it's worked great so far. The ssd should use less power and be more rugged. Why'd I do an actual HD instead of ssd? I had over a TB (didn't want to have to choose a subset to take with me) and for 79 bucks I can replace it in a year or 3 with a ssd if they have gotten high enough capacity and cheap enough by them.

 

[HankLloydRight]

I've been using a Oyen Digital U32 Shadow 1TB USB hard drive to play all of my music files on my car's sound system. It seems to have failed today. It has no power and is not recognized by the car or my several computers. So I'm in danger of losing nearly 1TB of files. Fortunately I backed many of them up.
.

Have you tried the freezer trick? Take a non-responding HDD and stick it in the freezer for a couple of hours.. then try accessing it. Much of the time they can be revived for long enough to back up what's on them.. but then they usually revert to failure mode pretty quick.

 

[CHG-ON]

I know! What am I to do?

Seriously though, I plugged in just a 120GB of music and it seems to take about 30 min to load. Every time I reboot, I have to go through it again. Doesn't make sense to me. I simply copied the tracks I wanted from iTunes on my Mac by dragging them from the iTunes library to the USB. Seems straight forward enough. It took FOREVER. I did the usual copy from the file manager over to USB with no problem on another stick, but half the songs did not have any metadata: artist and album-rather inconvenient. I can't scan by artist or anything in that method. I can only go through the folders option, which is quite tedious. I have seen a few recommendations for SW that could solve the problem. But I don't know which one will actually work completely. I wish that I could just plug my iPhone into the center console plug and access those directly, rather than only through Bluetooth, which is not what I want.

Is this thread the answer to my woes?

Thread: Easy iTunes playlist syncing for Tesla USB flash drive

Is this a FAT32 issue? I did not reformat the sticks.

Any help is very greatly appreciated!

Artsci,

What's happening here??? We come to you for all the answers, not vice versa! It's a sad day. :wink:

 

[artsci]

Have you tried the freezer trick? Take a non-responding HDD and stick it in the freezer for a couple of hours.. then try accessing it. Much of the time they can be revived for long enough to back up what's on them.. but then they usually revert to failure mode pretty quick.

Didn't know that trick. Will give it a try tonight. Thanks!

 

[ra-san]

CHG-ON, can discuss anything related to Majorlance's or my utils on that other thread, but wanted to note that your experience of indexing times that are *THAT* long doesn't seem right. I have been going through a lot more storage than that lately, as I've been testing multiple copies of a 15K track or so library, mostly flac.

I'd suggest you either have a bunch of cruft in your USB drive's filesystem that's slowing stuff down, or you have an exceptionally slow or failing USB stick/drive.
A reformat can't hurt, but also double check that the files you are putting over there are actually supported files. The lack of basic metadata (not including album art, which the S does poorly regardless) seems odd. If you have a known good, fast stick, as proven by fast copies on your computer, that'd be one to test against.


I formatted with FAT32 too, without issue. I figured that was the safest in terms of support.

 

[majorlance]

Agree with ra-san. I have a 256gb flash drive with about 14,000 files on it. It does take 5 minutes or so to load but that's it. Also, a song's metadata is stored in the song file and would never be lost (assuming it's flac, AAC, MP3 or AIFF- just not WAV) by copying it. If you're looking for playlists, use my applescript. If you want to copy without playlists, use ra-sans. Both require an Apple, btw, but there are decent options on Windows (try Media Monkey).

Flash drives are cheap and returnable. I'd try a new one. Also, if you get a USB 3 (assuming your computer supports it), the copy process will go much faster than with USB 2.

 

[CHG-ON]

Thanks guys. I am clearly doing something wrong because at least half of my songs will not play. I think dragging directly from iTunes may be part of the issue, if not all. I will try your script and hope that things improve. I wonder if DRM is part of the issue, though I know positively that some of the songs that will not play are not DRM, as I loaded them into iTunes from a CD and they will still not play.

Thanks so much!

 

[majorlance]

Another thought- I will bet they are apple lossless files. These won't play in the tesla and must be converted to flac first. The applications mentioned above do this automatically. And DRM files won't play and can't be converted. My script skips them, not certain how ra-sun handles them.

My my hunch is its the lossless files that are the issue.

Good luck.