Peabody

I was curious if anyone has manged to do a HDD Swap on their COMAND unit to get more than 10GB available to the music register? I've got my dash coming off today because the SRS detector corroded or something and needs to be cleaned and greased, and I figured I might give it a shot.. I'm not sure if they're using a IDE or SATA connector.. I'm hoping it's SATA with an SSD back there, because that's what I was planning to replace it with. I'm just wondering if anyone can confirm the hardware specs and filesystem so I can prep or just abandon it if it's an obsolete or proprietary thing that I won't be able to upgrade. It would be awesome if I could replace their like 60GB drive with a 280GB SSD and then resize the music register partition to like 200GB..

Josh.A.Hussey

That would be a nice mod.
I am not sure about what they have their.
I was talking with a fellow by the name of Bill here on the forum and originally he advised it would be a hassle when you can get quality and storage on an ipod.
But since you're taking the dash off anyways I wonder if it would be that difficult.
I am interested to see how this turns out if you do in fact try to get it done.

awstansbury

That's something I'd like to know, too. You may have to do some serious digging into MB technical documents to see if the OS can actually map more drive space than the OE-sized drive. If it's using the SATA protocol, the OS may not be able to map beyond the 40GB space, which means no matter the size of the hard drive you still only have access to the first 40GB of logical space. Also, if there's any password-protected, drive-level encryption on either the OE drive or the new drive you have yet another hurdle.

Let me know if you find the technical docs. I'm an engineer for a big tech company in their SSD group and I might be able to help. I'd love to be able to convert my entire music library to the hard drive and dump the driver's display iPod stuff.

Peabody

I saw something about it on a japanese forum (COMAND is manufactured by Mitsubishi I think) like a year or two ago.. I was hoping someone else had seen, or better yet performed this one. I guess it's time to play internet detective.

Here's a pretty good reference:
http://www.benzworld.org/forums/w212...placement.html

stosoorok

I replaced it with Samsung 80GB. Everything works fine, but sometimes it hangs a bit, specially when navigating. Sometimes DAS test give -f- also. Music Register can't be bigger than it is, tried everything.

https://mbworld.org/forums/5539914-post109.html

Now I use PCMCIA SDHC adapter with 32GB card.

https://mbworld.org/forums/5565093-post126.html

KCaudell

The 32GB card works great save for one PITA issue. Because of it's expanded storage, the "Reading Memory Card" message seems to take FOREVER!!

Ugh.

Other than that it's great!

K

awstansbury

That's what I figured. Changing that 4GB partition would require some knowledge of the OS (re-sizing the partitions); finding the source code is probably next to impossible. Plus, I'd be wary of voiding the warranty.

As the thread posted above suggests, swapping for a COMAND system with the USB interface (UMI?) and connecting a FAT32-formatted SSD in a USB case would solve the problem. I'll stick with my crappy iPod interface lol.

stosoorok

If You don't want to wait, then buy original pcmcia type2 32bit cardbus adapter for $100. It loads in max 5 seconds in every occasion, really fast and works with 32GB SDHC as well. Took some pictures too: