I've been looking but I can't seem to find any hard drive based devices for a car stereo. I'd like to be able to store my entire collection of audio files and have them available in my car at any time. I can hook up an Ipod, but I'd prefer something designed for the car. Do you know of any?

Only one I found was http://www.phatnoise.com/

However I eventually hooked my 30Gb iPod video to my Kenwood head unit and it works a treat. Using the Kenwood IP500 connector to the CD autochanger socket it acts just like a hard-drive player, with ID3 tags on the display and full control from the head unit.

I hardly ever use the iPod as it was intended - it's simply a 30Gb hard drive to me!

As I was falling asleep last night I started to wonder if I could get a car stereo with a USB port and a portable usb harddrive for a laptop or something. Would that work? Would the vibrations from driving damage it at all?

I think I will just use my ipod 30gb with my CD player.

I just find this car stereo supporting both USB and SD card.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Digital-car-radio-ster...1QQcmdZViewItem

I'm not sure about the sound quality!.

That unit has an unfortunately weak amp (4 X 25W) and only one pre-out. I don't think that's enough for most people's needs.

A few days I saw in a shop a Kenwood headunit with CD in front and a 10 GB hard disk inside. I can't remember model number. A year ago I also saw Sony had a car radio with a hard disk inside. Still, 10 or 20 GB might be not enough to store an entire collection.

Also in the same shop but also in other informatics shops I saw a carradio with on the front right two slots, 1 for a usb stick and 1 for Compact Flash or SD cards. Those were several non-prestige brands and judging from the frontpanel layout all these compact memory players must come from the same manufacturer. I read somewhere else these have important limitations in number of folders and songs in folders. Also I read the file system must me a specific one (FAT16 or FAT32 if I remember well). These radios are cheap though. I don't know whether an external hard disk can be hooked up.

Then there are few brands which allow DVD+-R with mp3, wma or aac. On DVD can store several dozens of albums.

After some investigations I came to one conclusion. To have in my car a collection of mp3 with a max limit of 60 GB the only option is to use an external device: an iPOD (with or without integrated interface with car radio) or an other brand via an RCA input (and therefore without possibility to handle through frontpanel).

I think someday I'm going to build a carputer. Then you can have any size hard drive. But the thing I still worry about with that idea is whether a normal hard drive can withstand the vibrations and bumps without getting messed up, physically.

Most of the carputers I've seen built in homebrew projects used laptop hard drives with a 3.5"->2.5" adapter for the IDE connector. The laptop drives are engineering to withstand a lot more shocks and bumps and such. The adapter is needed if you're connecting it to any kind of standard PC mobo (couple bucks for the adapter, max).

If I was building a carputer, I'd definitely use a laptop drive.

Oh I didn't know that. Thanks for the tips. I guess that must be why the old empeg riocar mp3 players used 2 laptop drives in them. Makes sense now.

There are now 2.5" SATA HD available.

In a recent project I realized (a boatputer) I used a Fujitsu MHT2080BH 80GB 2.5" SATA. I see that now you can even get a 200GB 2.5" SATA HD (MHV2200BT).

You built a boatputer?! That is hella cool. What motherboard did you use? I've been looking at the Via Epia ones and they seem pretty good. The other big issue is the monitor. I'm leaning towards a non-touch screen, with maybe a trackball-mouse to control things. And I've heard that you definitely need a VGA monitor, not a coax-connected one. Have you seen the post (somewhere here) from the guy who had a carputer and a Squeezebox hooked up to it? That was cool too.

Yes, I too used a VIA EPIA MB! For details about my boatputer look at this post.

Don't expect P4 speeds, but absolutely fit for charting and audio/video playback

Feel free to get in touch with me via PM if you need more details.

Cheers

Sergio

Try opening your eyes, there are loads out there!

I have had a phatbox and when I got a new car, I went with a Kenwood Keg. You can see more info on my setup here. I have an ipod, but I prefer the kenwood setup because it has a display and it is easy to use while keeping your eyes on the road with the VIOT (Voice Index On Tap) program.