External Hard Drive for ML350
Thread Starter
Newbie
Joined: Jan 2010
Posts: 11
Likes: 2
C350 4MATIC
External Hard Drive for ML350
Own a Bluetec ML350 2012 (Purchased in October 2011, Canadian Version). I've tried to connect an external hard drive via the USB connector but the system only reads a portion of it (approximately 16GB out of 100GB). The HD was formatted using FAT32 and it works fine on my C350 (2011). Anyone have any suggestions or solutions tested?
Member
Joined: Oct 2012
Posts: 94
Likes: 0
S550, SRX, ML550
I attached a 500GB external drive to my ML and it worked fine (formatted with exFat), you might check to see how much power your external drive needs? I see in the manual that the USB port will only supply 500 milliamps (2.5W at 5V), so if you have one of those bigger 3.5" drives it might be trying to draw too much power.
Initially I thought an external hard drive was a good idea, but I ran into the following snags:
- Every time the car starts up the hard drive is re-initialized (scanned for music and pictures by the ML), which takes time.
- The last song that was playing is not remembered, the command system starts playing from the first song it finds.
- Mechanical hard drives stop working at high altitude (as anyone who went skiing with those old school iPods found out), even when it works the life span of the drive will be dramatically reduced.
So I ended up getting a 128GB SD card from Amazon for a little over $100, it works great - none of the problems I listed above!
I have around 9,000 songs loaded with more than 50% capacity remaining. The owners manual says that the maximum you can have on the SD card is 15,000 songs, so I suspect that I'll run into that limit long before I run out of space on the card.
2c
Initially I thought an external hard drive was a good idea, but I ran into the following snags:
- Every time the car starts up the hard drive is re-initialized (scanned for music and pictures by the ML), which takes time.
- The last song that was playing is not remembered, the command system starts playing from the first song it finds.
- Mechanical hard drives stop working at high altitude (as anyone who went skiing with those old school iPods found out), even when it works the life span of the drive will be dramatically reduced.
So I ended up getting a 128GB SD card from Amazon for a little over $100, it works great - none of the problems I listed above!
I have around 9,000 songs loaded with more than 50% capacity remaining. The owners manual says that the maximum you can have on the SD card is 15,000 songs, so I suspect that I'll run into that limit long before I run out of space on the card.
2c
Member
Joined: Oct 2012
Posts: 94
Likes: 0
S550, SRX, ML550
Oh - I forgot to mention... when you plug a device (HDD, SD Card) in that has a LOT of files it takes the system some time to scan and recognize them. I think it reads MP3 tag information including artist/album/picture etc from each individual file before it shows in the master list.
Give your device some time (say 30 minutes?) and see if the complete list shows up?
Give your device some time (say 30 minutes?) and see if the complete list shows up?
Super Member
Joined: Mar 2012
Posts: 619
Likes: 34
From: East part of Texas
2017 CLS550
I have a carrying case of several 2 gb SD cards and a few pen drives up to 8 gbs. This is all I could ever need. An external HD of 500 or more would be overkill. The larger the drive the larger the problems.
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Newbie
Joined: Mar 2015
Posts: 1
Likes: 0
ML350
ML350 - USB starts playing from the first song
Hi, I am using a 64 gb pen drive with around 20 folders in it. It is formatted with FAT32. Whenever i start my car, it doesn't remember the last played song instead starts playing the first song. Now its haunting me just like an alarm tone. Pls help.
Member
Joined: Nov 2012
Posts: 98
Likes: 0
From: Alberta, Canada
ml350 bluetec
I burn mp3's onto cd discs. 10 1/2 hours per CD & 6 CDs gives 63 hours of different music. Thats enough.
Oh, and some of the music is european, so I get omalauts (å, ü etc.) & ß on the digital display, complete with CD cover and title of my original CD.
Oh, and some of the music is european, so I get omalauts (å, ü etc.) & ß on the digital display, complete with CD cover and title of my original CD.
Last edited by Kaasmann; Mar 29, 2015 at 05:48 PM. Reason: more description
Newbie
Joined: Mar 2015
Posts: 14
Likes: 0
From: Boston, MA
2015 ML350
The easiest way to get lots of music into your ML is definitely via SD card. You can get them on Amazon for as cheap at $9.99 and as expensive at $100+ depending on the size and speed of the card. Since its just holding music, you don't need to get the "Xtreme" or "Ultra" cards with higher write speeds, those are mostly used for recording high def video when you need fast write speeds to keep up with the data size. So buy the cheapest card in the size you want and then just drag all your songs from iTunes onto the card, plop it into the ML and voila, you have thousands of songs at your fingertips. Best part is when you restart the car or switch inputs, the SD card will always start playing from the same spot you stopped at. Also, it gives you the option to search by track name, artist, album, etc because .mp3 holds a lot of that info in the file data.
