I appreciate the help guys! I will be hooking the hard drive up to the usb2 line. And purchasing a flash drive today to have in case the hard drive keeps giving me trouble

 

Looks like my hard drive was the problem. Bought a 16gb flash drive and problem solved!

 

500gb too big. I heard from one of the mustang geeks at a car show that u should use a smaller size mainly for faster indexing purposes..

where would u be going to be needing that much music anyway?

 

I had the hard drive sitting around I'd figured I can use it to play my music. I bought a 16gb flash drive, it solved my problem.

 

16gb flash drive, that's what I use, too. Works perfectly.

 

Yeah, 16GB is a good size, but some (most, and all the cheap ones) of them are really slow to load up/change. You lucky guys in the U.S. can get some very much faster 32GB USB3.0 flash drives for quite cheap now. Always get USB 3.0, they're noticeably faster than 2.0, even when using with 2.0, and 32GB is the new sweet spot (price vs size), was 16GB for a few years. Be careful what model you choose, some are incredibly slow:

...Like Those really tiny 16GB flash drives that some mentioned/recommended in another thread for in the console cubby, they absolutely suck for transfer speed. Once you have the patience to load one of these, you'll never want to do it again... IMO better to get the full size ones and stick 'em on USB2 in the glove box.

 

I use 128 gig 3.0 flash drives with no issues indexing. They're cheap enough now that it's not a big deal to own one or three. My biggest issue is that I have to go through my library and remove the songs I don't want for in-car listening. I listen to different music based on where I am. At home I like it a bit more relaxed, in the car, I like it a bit more spirited. Makes it a pain when you are sifting through 50 gigs of music. lol.

 

Are you sure it's fat32? How did you format it? I ask because iirc windows doesn't let you format fat32 drives anywhere near that large anymore, and I had some issues getting it to read a 120GB hdd that i formatted in linux. I haven't investigated it further, so I don't know for sure what the issue is, and I'm curiuos about whether you had the same approach.

 

What is the advantage (if any) of hooking it into the micro USB slot in the Sync module??

 

You can download a utility for windows to format in fat32.

 

Oh yeah, no doubt get the larger capacity ones if you don't mind the price, they tend to be a bit faster than the same type but smaller capacity ones. You do the same as me re changing the tunes, different ones for in the car, so that's why I mentioned the cheaper tiny USB 2.0 16GB flash drives are a real pain for loading/editing, any file transfer really...for me.

I have used a small 500GB HDD on USB2, but there's only about 100GB of music on it, and it was fine for indexing speed too. You can get some 1TB HDDs now that apparently will work with regular USB port power, but I haven't tried larger than 500GB ones.