External Hard Drive For Music Plugged Into Usb Port

[RichardO]

I have an IS300h which is just over 12 months old. My 120G iPod generally works well with the exception that it sometimes has to be disconnected and rebooted which I think is more an issue with the iPod than the music system in the car. My biggest issue is I am sick of fighting with iTunes and find it a very unfriendly program to use so I want to replace the iPod with an external hard drive of the same capacity. I bought a 120G media storage unit that plug into the USB of the car and it recognised that there was a device plugged in but would not display any files on it. Can I plug a hard drive of that size in and have the car read it or do I need some intermediary software for sorting the music so the car music system can read it. The car plays smaller USB drives of 16G without any problem or any other software. Thanks for you help.

[Lexus Nerd]

I have also tried to used external hard disk drives on a 2010 Lexus IS USB port in the past, to no avail.

At the time, I suspected that the Lexus USB interface s designed to only work with devices that appear to be USB flash drives, not USB hard drives; but I've read some material online and I have my doubts on that theory.

Try the following:

• Ensure that the disk is formatted to FAT32, not NTFS.
• Do a simple test by removing all files from the 120 GB drive, except for a few MP3 (.mp3), WMA (.wma) or AAC (.m4a) files in the root directory. Don't try to confuse the multimedia system by having other kinds of files - or too many files/folders - on the disk.

[mivarpet]

I had a similar problem with my MY13 IS350. Turning off the album art display on the stereo made a big improvement to reliability.

The iPod still locked up from time to time (maybe once a month).

Hope this helps