Answered: Why it takes so long to read USB device

[1Ronnie]

So I have about 5000 songs on a 20Gb USB drive, and so far have had no problems waiting for it to read all of my drive, it usually took about 3 to 4 minutes to enable the LIST, GENRE, ARTIST buttons ... until today.

Last night a spent a few hours creating three huge playlists from my music collection to create virtual radio stations which I can use with Random play.

So when I plugged in my drive today, I drove for about 45 minutes twice, and it still hasn't enabled the buttons on the HU. So I created another small USB stick, with the same huge playlists, but only 2 albums on it, and sure enough the buttons became active in about 20 seconds, and when I go into the LIST button, I see the three playlists, but only the songs on the albums on the USB device appear in each Playlist.

So in conclusion, the Head Unit seems to validate each and every playlist, making sure every song appears on the disk before allowing you to use the soft buttons. So the worst scenario is heaps of songs and very long playlists. I don't know if the same occurs with iPod or not.

[MOCKBA]

Thanks for clarification, I was about to buy 320GB USB at Costco today which doesn't require additional power. Now I know, it is useless. iPod is only a solution to manage hige songs collections.