Hi,

I strongly consider buying an about 1 year old N810 for about 120€. I would want to mainly use it as a music player in my car.

In fact I would want to use it in combination with an external HDD containing about 260gb worth of mp3s (or about 35000 songs).

And while I understand how and that it shouldn't be much of a problem to connect the HDD to the N810, I'm not yet clear if the N810 will actually be able to handle as many music files.

Can I expect a somewhat usable speed when my media library contains 35.000 songs? How about having all those songs in one huge playlist and playing them randomly?

While looking through these forums I did find two people rasing similar questions but regrettably there was no real answer given. So... would this be actually working in a somewhat satisfying manner?

Cheerio!

Is this correct?

It's not pretty, but it's been successfully done with a 160gb drive. I've personally tried the exact same setup (minus the hard drive model) myself with no luck. While it's easy to plug in a flash drive (with the proper adapters), it is not as easy with a hard drive because of varying power requirements. See more here: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=212130

In regards to the quantity of files, you shouldn't have an issue. You may have an issue if dealing with large files. For example, I've got a SD card adapter for my n810 (external) --- tranferring small files is not as issue, but if I try to transfer a 1-2GB file, the tablet reboots itself.

Thanks for the reply. Would my guess be right, that I probably wouldn't experience any (big) speed issues when browsing through 35000 music files that are stored on the external HDD in canola or any other media player?

I'm actually looking for something that looks and feels somewhat similar to Winamp and its Media Library on my Windows PC.

Indeed I did expect to supply the external HDD with power from the cigarette lighter.
As far as I've read once the power requirements of a HDD are taken care of there shouldn't be much of an issue with using one?

I would try Canola media player... that's what I use exclusively on my tablet for playing MP3s.

The speed to "sift through" through all files would (I'm assuming) be largely dependent on the app you're using; if you use the maemo file manager, it will probably be VERY slow. Canola *may* (not sure) could be faster because it would index all the media that you have instead of reading the file directories every time. Also, not sure if Canola has a cap in terms of the number of files.

In terms of power requirements, it's all really up in the air. The guy in the other post successfuly used his external hard drive. I tried the same thing with the same model battery and y-cable USB, but it did not work for my hard drive. But yes, assuming the power requirements are met, it should work.