In such a digital age I am limited to a 32GB flash drive?
Ordered a Sony AVX-AV8100 Head Unit. Not top of the line but not bottom of the barrel.
It plays FLAC files which is a huge plus. I have nearly 500 gigs and always growing of Lossless audio files and about the same in compressed audio.
Disappointing that a headunit that is designed to play Audio and Video that does not have a physical media slot would be limited to 32GB.
The headunit also has an HDMI port and I plan on utilizing an Amazon FireTV and I can hook a USB drive to that but will not have touch screen on the dash capabilities.

Sony says larger drives might work but performance will be lacking if it reads it.

I have the same gripe with my game cameras but those are far lower on the technology scale than this head unit.

I'd give it a try with the larger card before you do anything else. It sounds like they just tested up to 32 and didn't bother with anything else. My guess is that any performance degradation is likely to be negligible.

I would make sure your SD card meets or exceeds the rating on your head unit, listed in your manual, then go full speed ahead with a 128 or 256 GB card.

If you're going to do an external hard drive I'd suggest a SSD for shock resistance. The speed bump compared to spinning disk drives here is much less important.

My Alpine says it only can handle 128gb but I have tried a 1tb (ssd with usb adaptor) and it works but only sees around 500gb of data for some reason.
I wanted to have access to my entire collection but seems I can't get it all at once.
FWIW

^ That might be part of the issue with the nearly 10 yr old OE head unit in my car (2012 Malibu).
IIRC I've got a 32gb stick & it is pretty sluggish between songs & I don't think it grabs all the data.

When I had my F150 (2016 Sync3), it did not like USB3.0 USB sticks. They got really hot & would lock up. Switched back to a USB2.0 drive & it was perfect.

quote:

Sony AVX-AV8100

Looks like it has Bluetooth. Put your songs on your phone, and Bob should be your uncle.

quote:

Originally posted by joel9507:

quote:

Sony AVX-AV8100

Looks like it has Bluetooth. Put your songs on your phone, and Bob should be your uncle.

I'm guessing Bluetooth audio uses lossy compression, which negates the whole point of having FLAC.

In any case I would look into the type of file systems the head unit is able to read. I once had a rental car that would only do FAT16. I was driving it for a month, so I took the time to figure out how to format my USB stick to FAT16, then copied all my music back to the stick.

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
My Alpine says it only can handle 128gb but I have tried a 1tb (ssd with usb adaptor) and it works but only sees around 500gb of data for some reason.
I wanted to have access to my entire collection but seems I can't get it all at once.
FWIW

I have a 13 or all year old Alpine and did the same but only would read like 50gb.
Plus it took forever to load and display any information.
The smaller drive did fine.

quote:

Originally posted by joel9507:

quote:

Sony AVX-AV8100

Looks like it has Bluetooth. Put your songs on your phone, and Bob should be your uncle.

iPhones do not support FLAC.
Even if it did streaming over Bluetooth would negate the reason for using FLAC.

I have a Galaxy tab that supports FLAC and the head unit has wired android auto but the Galaxy tab is my dedicated navigation device and don’t want to load it down with files.

I’ll give a 500gb drive a shot.
I can live with 500gb as long as it works right.