External Hard Drive for my car?

[Rmp5s]

The Kenwood CD player (an KDC-MP435U) in my car has a USB jack in the front. I have a 2 gig pen drive in it now loaded with mp3s and it's great. Holds a ton of stuff and you don't have to change or carry any CDs around. I was thinking today about how I wish I had bought the little 12 gig flash pen drive thing I saw on clearance at Office Depot for 75 bucks and I had an idea...but I'm not sure if it will work...why couldn't I get, for instance, a 250 gig external USB hard drive and use THAT instead? I'll NEVER have to carry another CD again!

Anyway...my question is will it work in a car? I know that those kinds of drives aren't flash and have an actual disk in them that spins and I don't know how well the thing will work on a bumpy road or how well the thing will work in the temperature extremes of a car. Think it'd be ok?

 

[ohnoes]

depends. if the external works like a flash drive. sure

 

[Rmp5s]

Well yea...but how big do flash drives get storage wise? Biggest I've ever seen was that 12 gig...

 

[ohnoes]

http://www.wolfcamera.com/product/EP4529262.htm
thats the largest ive ever seen for a pen drive

your extrernal might work but depends

 

[Rmp5s]

That's thing's two grand!! That's hillarious.

I'm tempted to just try it and see what happens. I can get a 500 gig external drive for ~120 bucks which isn't bad. I just don't know what all the vibration would do to it...not to mention I'm going to be running 1200 watts to 2 ten inch subs...I just don't know if the thing would work or not with all this going on.

 

[Lowndsey]

what would the constant vibrations and bumps of the car do to the hard drive over time? couldnt be good for it surely

 

[Rmp5s]

I don't really care... doesn't really matter a whole lot..

 

[Juice1]

If you get... say, a cheap 100gb external, it should work. I don't see it lasting more then a year so don't get 250gb. So as long as you have your stuff backed up in your computer, and the price is cheap, it shouldn't be a problem to replace it

 

[Osak]

I would suggest a Seagate external harddrive. They have a program preloaded on the portable drives called "Creedo" it can automatically back up your drive when you plug it in to your computer so if your drive ever fails due to the bumps and what not of driving you will still have a backup Iv seen there 160gig versions for as cheap as 100.00 USD

 

[Rmp5s]

I would suggest a Seagate external harddrive. They have a program preloaded on the portable drives called "Creedo" it can automatically back up your drive when you plug it in to your computer so if your drive ever fails due to the bumps and what not of driving you will still have a backup Iv seen there 160gig versions for as cheap as 100.00 USD

That's actually the exact one I was looking at. I'll probably pick up one of the 100-150 gig ones, as opposed to a 500 gig like I was originally looking at, and just ride it out for as long as I can. Maybe I can build a little bed for it or something like that in the glove box. There's nothing in there anyway. I bet it'd be just fine in there if I put something soft under it to absorb the big pot holes and stuff. I could even do something like build a nice, cooshy box for it in the trunk and run a USB cable up to the head unit. My car's not that big (2002 Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec-V) so that would probably be doable too. This is definately something I'm going to do. Any "cusioning" ideas?

Thanks for the ideas, guys!