[ghpk]

Have Experience With Sandisk Cruzer fit, so this works for FIT.


The size and shape so tiny, looks like the owner or product designers broke their USB Headunit port or drive and came up with this excellent product.

However most users complaint about very low speed data transfer, same was with me, when I ordered the first one last month, the speeds were pathetic for "out of the box".
Then I recalled data transfer speeds are better on NTFS file system but you cannot have it on USB drives which needs to be played in a Car HU, as most HU would accept only FAT32 formatted drives.

Then as the test USB drive was only 4GB and 8GB were out of stock when this itch happened to me, I re-ordered 2 of the 8GB ones to have, now it was time to move the content from 4 GB to 8GB drive.


On last such occassion I experienced under 900kb/s transfer rates.
So this time I applied a little trick to not to use factory formatted drive and remove the password/secure access application too, so I opted to format the drive on a win7 laptop,
I selected a different "Allocation unit size" this time selected "32 kilobytes"
and voila, the transfer speed was 8MB/second which came to stable 4-5MB when I was copying large bunch of mp3's
Took screenshot, but i misplaced it on laptop somwhere, will post it later if needed.



Ofcourse there's more to this technical aspect of file system but this worked like a charm for me, without any problem, my JVC HU plays the stuff off this drive and It copies files real fast for me.

So if you are planning to get rid of your long sized USB Drive and buy a sandisk cruzer Fit, make sure you try format it with Allocation unit size as 32kilobytes instead of default value of 16 kilobytes which is shown as default on format window.

Just make sure you keep a backup or retain your old USB drive till you are sure that everything is copied to new drive and is working the way you wanted.

[Viraat13]

I use this pen drive too in both of my cars. I feel that the slow transfer speed isn't a deal breaker. Spending 5 minutes more waiting for the songs to transfer doesn't bother me as I do it only once a month. I doubt anyone does this everyday, which is why as an attachment to a HU, it is the perfect fit.

[Rehaan]

I have a 2 GB (or is it 4GB?) pen drive attached to my Vento's RCD510 HU.

The problem is that the car takes almost a minute to "initialize / read media" since its full of MP3s. Would this trick speed this read time up as well?

cya
R

[Viraat13]

Originally Posted by Rehaan

I have a 2 GB (or is it 4GB?) pen drive attached to my Vento's RCD510 HU.

The problem is that the car takes almost a minute to "initialize / read media" since its full of MP3s. Would this trick speed this read time up as well?

cya
R

I think it's more to do with the HU. In my car the music plays within a second. Maybe because mine is a 16 GB with just 250 songs or so?

[ghpk]

Originally Posted by Rehaan

I have a 2 GB (or is it 4GB?) pen drive attached to my Vento's RCD510 HU.

The problem is that the car takes almost a minute to "initialize / read media" since its full of MP3s. Would this trick speed this read time up as well?

cya
R

I hope so, As the drive would read/write data on bigger allocation size, the data should be processed faster, hence decrease in time taken in reading and writing should be visible, However it does depends on the HU how much time improvement it can show.

[theexperthand]

Originally Posted by Rehaan

The problem is that the car takes almost a minute to "initialize / read media" since its full of MP3s. Would this trick speed this read time up as well?

cya
R

Try removing the ID3 tag info from the MP3 files if you do not use the info to sort \ play songs. I do this regularly to reduce the initial read time of USB drive in my Alpine CDA 117.

[DerAlte]

Originally Posted by theexperthand

Try removing the ID3 tag info ... to reduce the initial read time ...

How would that help? Normally the HU firmware only reads directory structure on startup, not even file names from directories other than the first (or last read) directory. Even if you blank (removing = blanking out the field, field still remains) the info, the HU will show blank field *only* while playing the song.

[hrman]

This is a good tip. When I bought my sandisk cruzer 8GB, i formatted it by default. I do this for all new pen drives. I have never had any issues of slow read write speeds. Its usually consistent at 5-7 mbps.

One more tip is to not push this Cruzer too deep into the USB slot. Since it doesn't have a handle to pull it out, it out can be an ordeal as I realised yesterday. It works even if its not pushed in fully.

[theexperthand]

Originally Posted by DerAlte

How would that help? Normally the HU firmware only reads directory structure on startup, not even file names from directories other than the first (or last read) directory. Even if you blank (removing = blanking out the field, field still remains) the info, the HU will show blank field *only* while playing the song.

CDA 117 banks the info to make future searches faster, but the time taken for banking is considerable. By removing the ID3 tag info, we are effectively reducing the info to bank, so the banking process gets over in a jiffy.

[DerAlte]

Originally Posted by theexperthand

CDA 117 banks the info to make future searches faster, ...

Plausible, but ...

If CDA 117 can search within ID3 tags ("Bank" function), AND there is no ID3 tag info, it can't search for the same. So you are necessarily assuming that Search on ID3 info is not required when you are discarding it, assuming it will speed up initial load? Strange.

The manual (Page 30) seems to say that when "Banking" is displayed ('Bank' is being prepared), song playback takes place anyhow. So why discard ID3 tags? There is no initial load delay!