Compatible USB devices

solar_dave · Jul 30, 2011

From the pdf manual

USB-Supported Devices
The USB connector uses the
following:
. USB 2.0.
. USB flash sticks or pen drives.
. Portable USB Hard Drives.
Special care needs to be taken
related to the power source
of these devices (USB bus
powered vs. external power).
. Portable media adapters that
support SD Flash, Compact
Flash, or SD Micro.
Depending on the USB mass
storage device, some devices
might not be recognized.

I have a 8 GB stick that works OK but an adapter with a 32GB CF flash does not and a WD 60GB hard drive does not as well. All formatted FAT(32). Any clue what the limitations are on the USB port?

DonC · Jul 30, 2011

When you say it doesn't work, exactly how doesn't it work? I have a 32 Gig flash stick that works but my nano 64 Gig reads the playlist but doesn't play the selected song. I'm thinking it has more to do with the number of songs than the power.

solar_dave · Jul 30, 2011

Does not even recognize them.

MTN Ranger · Jul 30, 2011

The WD hard drive may require more power than the USB in the car provides. I have seen that USB ports tend to vary in their power capabilties. For example, some Blu-ray players are picky with different SD cards and USB flash drives.

Steverino · Nov 27, 2011

Thinking that the Volt's USB port may not provide enough power for a WD 320GB laptop drive mounted in a USB case, I powered the USB case and the hard drive definitely spins up, but the Volt still does not see the drive. The drive is formatted with FAT32. I'm beginning to think the Volt either can't handle the number of files, or there is something else about an external drive it does not like.

solar_dave · Nov 27, 2011

Try making the initial Partiton 32 GB. That would be interesting.

Steverino · Nov 28, 2011

I partitioned the disk into a 32 GB FAT32. That did not work either.

I tested a few with special characters on a small thumb drive to see if tboult's tip on naming is the cause. Some titles have ' and () and as well as &. All worked from the thumb drive. Hmmph.

BillK · Nov 28, 2011

Problem with Transfer from USB to HDD

I set out to copy about 1300 m4a songs (originally ripped from CD into iTunes on a Mac -- not downloads) that I had loaded onto an 8GB HP memory stick. The first CD on the USB stick would play nicely, but accessing any other album or track brought up an alert that said "Creating List" with a progress bar. The progress stopped after about 5 minutes and froze before completion. I waited another 10 minutes and then shut off the car.

Thinking I had clogged the system with so many songs, or perhaps there was a problem with that USB stick, I copied half of the tunes to a 4GB Sandisk USB stick. All went smoothly when I used that approach, and the files play nicely on the HDD. I then took the other half of the tunes and tried the same procedure, but the process was again hung up at the "Creating List" stage. OK -- maybe there was a corrupted file in that batch, so I removed half of the files on the USB stick and tried again. That transfer worked. Then trying the group of remaining files the system hung as before. I tried half of those and the system hung again, so I thought I had isolated the problem to that group. But when I tried transferring the other half of the remainders, the system hung as before. In fact, if I take any of the 18 albums that haven't transferred, and try to take it across individually, I get the same crash on the "Creating List" screen. Any thoughts?

I also tried several different USB memory sticks formatted in both the Mac and a PC. Same results. I even went through the song and album titles and removed all punctuation or anything other than plain text. Still no luck. It seems like the system just doesn't want to do this anymore, but I've used only about 15 % of the HDD capacity.

BTW -- Another oddity... When I look at the Song List on the HDD, all of the transferred files appear twice: in alphabetically arranged order with the the top half of the list displaying a prefix before the song title that looks like "._01 Song Name", and then again in the bottom half with just the song title like "Song Name". Is that normal?

The titles with the prefix don't play, and if they appear in shuffle mode they are skipped until a song without the prefix pops up, and that song will play perfectly. I erased one of the prefix titles, and the non-prefix copy of the same song plays as it should. I'd like to erase all those useless titles, but the process would take many hours. Is there a shortcut to do that?

Thanks for any assistance!

Krellion · Nov 28, 2011

BillK said:
BTW -- Another oddity... When I look at the Song List on the HDD, all of the transferred files appear twice: in alphabetically arranged order with the the top half of the list displaying a prefix before the song title that looks like "._01 Song Name", and then again in the bottom half with just the song title like "Song Name". Is that normal?

The titles with the prefix don't play, and if they appear in shuffle mode they are skipped until a song without the prefix pops up, and that song will play perfectly. I erased one of the prefix titles, and the non-prefix copy of the same song plays as it should.

This may be due to how the Mac does its file system: There can be a hidden resource file for every file you see on the system (holds metadata about the file, such as type, so no need for extensions), so when you copied the files over to your USB drive, the resource file was also copied. It's safe to delete the resource files, as you've done. Macs (and other Unix-based OSes) will not show them (the preceding . at the beginning hides the file by default), but you'll see them on other systems, such as Windows or the Volt.

solar_dave · Nov 28, 2011

if you drag and drop right out of itunes to the USB drive it will be much cleaner.

Steverino · Nov 28, 2011

I wonder if the Tesla has these issues?

After seeing Elon Musk bringing up a web browser on the Model S nav screen, I'm guessing they have finessed this a bit better than Chevy.

I've tried formatting my 320GB USB hard drive in both Mac and Windows, using all available disk format options and so far no joy. I have powered the drive from both the USB port as well as via the 12v port. More experiments to go. It should not be this difficult.

BillK · Nov 29, 2011

Well, one thing I noticed in the Volt Manual (page 7-16) is that there is a 1,000 song limit on the number of audio files that can be displayed when using a USB device. The Nav system manual doesn't seem to mention any such limit, which is probably why I got into trouble trying to load 1300 songs.

Steverino, you may want to try a smaller USB memory stick with less than 1,000 tunes -- also check the format and sector size limits listed on page 7-16 of the Volt Manual to see if your 320GB drive qualifies.

Solar Dave, I will try the direct drag out of iTunes as you suggest. I was copying out the iTunes media in the finder, which may explain why I was getting the extraneous information. Thanks!

Steverino · Nov 29, 2011

BillK said:
Steverino, you may want to try a smaller USB memory stick with less than 1,000 tunes -- also check the format and sector size limits listed on page 7-16 of the Volt Manual to see if your 320GB drive qualifies.

I tried using the drive with just one MP3 file (which successfully loaded via a small thumb drive). No go. The Volt acts like no USB device is plugged in.

My 2011 owners manual says nothing about format or sector limits. Page 7-16 is about XM radio. Page 7-26 lists some supported file types (MP3, WMA, etc.) and page 7-31 list some minimal info for USB hard drives but nothing about drive formats, etc. Maybe you are referring to a different manual?

BillK · Nov 29, 2011

There can be a hidden resource file for every file you see on the system (holds metadata about the file, such as type, so no need for extensions), so when you copied the files over to your USB drive, the resource file was also copied.

Thanks for that hint. I recall that in the pre-OSX days all Mac files had a data fork and a resource fork, but I thought that went away when they switched to the Linux basis for the newer OS. Nice to know.

tfford · Nov 29, 2011

BillK said:
when they switched to the Linux basis for the newer OS

Not that this is the forum for it, which it's not (so short). And not that it's really important but just an FYI, Mac OSX is based the Mach Kernel plus some FreeBSD, NetBSD ultimately becoming NeXTSTEP and Darwin, not Linnux. At the end of the day all derivatives of the original AT&T UNIX

Yadda, yadda, yadda

MTN Ranger · Nov 29, 2011

I don't have the Nav or 30GB hard drive. I was going to get two 64GB SD cards and use them with the USB input. But after thinking about it I bought a used 120GB iPod off eBay for $80. Half the cost and a better interface than using flash memory. I'll be hooking it up later this week.

BillK · Nov 29, 2011

Maybe you are referring to a different manual?

I was quoting from my 2012 manual -- they must have made some significant changes from 2011 on this topic. My manual states: Only USB MP3 players and USB drives with a sector size or [sic -- I think they meant of] 512 bytes and a cluster size smaller or equal to 32 kbytes in the FAT32 file system are supported.

Most of the USB memory sticks of 8MB and smaller should fit this profile. Perhaps the larger sticks use a larger sector size. Just guessing - that knowledge is above my pay grade.

Just to let you know my current scheme... I am going to erase all the transferred songs on the Volt's HDD, and start over using the method suggested by Solar Dave (drag and drop songs to the USB stick directly out of iTunes). But before doing that my wife and I are creating a new iTunes library containing just the songs we want in the car, being sure all the sample rates, bit-depths, and codecs are the same. Hopefully that will help. I'll post the results soon.

Steverino · Nov 30, 2011

Thanks BillK. I also got the same reply from my Volt Advisor (with a few more details):

"Per the owner's manual, section 7-18 Infotainment System:

The USB, MP3 players and USB drives connected must comply with the USB Mass Storage Class specification (USB MSC). Only USB, MP3 players and USB drives with a sector size or 512 bytes and a cluster size smaller or equal to 32 kbytes in the FAT32 file system are supported. Hard disk drives are not supported.

The following restrictions apply for the data stored on a USB MP3 player or USB device:
•Maximum folder structure depth: 11 levels.
•Maximum number of MP3/ WMA files that can be displayed: 1,000.

WMA with Digital Rights Management (DRM) from online music shops cannot be played. WMA files can only be played back safely if they were created with Windows Media Player version 8 or later.
•Applicable playlist extensions are: .m3u, .pls.
•Playlist entries must be in the form of relative paths.
•The system attribute for folders/files that contain audio data must not be set.

So, it sounds like it has to be a flash drive, the Volt will not support hard drives."

Krellion · Nov 30, 2011

Steverino said:
"The USB, MP3 players and USB drives connected must comply with the USB Mass Storage Class specification (USB MSC). Only USB, MP3 players and USB drives with a sector size of 512 bytes and a cluster size smaller or equal to 32 kbytes in the FAT32 file system are supported. Hard disk drives are not supported."

From what I've seen, a lot of newer drives (both HDD and SSD) have switched to 4KB sector sizes. I'm wondering if newer USB thumbdrives have also started transitioning to the larger sector size or not. GM may have to do a software update to allow for it in the future.

silvercorvette · Nov 30, 2011

I was going to ask the same question, I recorded a few old radio shows in MP3 format but the car does not reconize my Sandisk cruzer 16 GB USB stick

tfford · Nov 30, 2011

For those of you . . .

Who are making the statement that your USB device can't be used, are you actually getting no recognition of a USB device at all or are you getting the message I get when I plug in some of my USB flash drives, "This media cannot be used."?

In either case, obvious that device can't be used, just curious.

Steverino · Dec 1, 2011

tfford, the Volt asks you to plug in a USB device, even though it's already plugged in and on. The drive is totally ignored, like it's not even there.

Krellion, According to my Volt Advisor, hard disk drives are not supported even if they conform to the specs (USB 2.0, complies with USB Mass Storage Class, with sector size of 512 bytes, and cluster size of 32 kbytes, formatted FAT32), though I am waiting for further clarification. My hard drive does meet the above specs and the Volt ignores it.

My current understanding is only USB flash drives (and MP3 players) that conform to the above specs will be recognized. Of course, the files on the drives have additional requirements.

It just seems odd that the Volt will discriminate based on the material the drive uses to record data. Even odder if you consider that iPods (an "MP3 player") use hard drives. For example the iPod Video uses a 240GB hard drive.

MTN Ranger · Jun 9, 2012

I have had numerous problems with two different 120GB iPod Classics. I finally sold one of them and bought two 64GB SD cards. As long as you format them to FAT32 they work great - all the songs show up without any duplicates like I was getting with the iPods. I didn't notice a difference on the sector size (you can always adjust that during formatting).

drbruns · Jun 9, 2012

I had problems with my 120gb iPod Classic, but I have a new iPod touch that works pretty well.

Compatible USB devices

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