Quick Dsport Plus Questions

[Human after all]

The owners handbook warns against plugging hard drives into the USB socket. I bought a 128GB memory stick when I knew the car was about to be delivered, I've managed to fit my entire CD collection ( over 25,000 tracks ) onto it at a good quality bit rate

Does anyone know what the danger of plugging in a large drive is?

[Human after all]

just make sure the hdd isnt ntfs id imagine and on drives bigger than about 40gb windows 7 defaults to ntfs and wont allow you to change

Defaults to ntfs? Are you sure? I am currently using a fat32 640gb hard drive.

[sted]

Defaults to ntfs? Are you sure? I am currently using a fat32 640gb hard drive.

if you formatted it it should be ntfs if it came preformatted it probably diddnt come ntfs

[PX54]

Does anyone know what the danger of plugging in a large drive is?

So long as it's a propper external HDD and not an internal HDD in an enclosure i cant see an issue. Because internal drives are built to be used inside a PC with a fan they won't cool as well as external drives when left running for long periods of time.

[mix]

Because internal drives are built to be used inside a PC with a fan they won't cool as well as external drives when left running for long periods of time.

I don't think heat would be your problem if you were using a 3.5" drive in an enclosure. Powering the drive would be your problem.

[Bigfeet]

^

Hit's the nail on the head. The USB socket in the DS3 is only designed to provide a very small voltage of power, about 1.5v tops. Now an external HD will put that socket under stress with an increased power demand, if you insist on using one then I would strongly advise you to provide it with a separate power source.

[Human after all]

Ok, thanks. That makes sense. Have you had any experience of USB ports not working anymore because of that?

[Bigfeet]

We did replace one that had failed, we never knew what was plugged in but the unit was fried.

[Human after all]

I'm probably not going to use an external hard drive now.

Out of interest Zack, what makes you confident about using your 1TB drive? Are you hoping for the best, or do you have some cool electrician type knowledge?