USB Hard Drive with 6FL works
 

I found out that the 6FL USB option in my 2009 X5 35d will support an external hard drive. This is the USB port in the armrest console, so the files are played directly from this port. My car does not have the option to upload to an internal drive, as in the 2010.

Hard Drive:
I have a Western Digital Passport 120GB drive. This drive takes its power from the USB cable. I am using the short USB cable that comes with the drive. The BMW Tech note says the USB port is specified for 500mA but not to use external hard drives. However it works fine for me. If you try this you might check the power requirements for your drive, but most should operate below 500mA.

Caveat: It appears that the USB port power stays ON even if the car is OFF and the doors are locked. I am disconnecting the drive each night to avoid high battery drain.

Formatting the Hard Drive:
The BMW tech note states FAT formatting, fortunately FAT32 works. FAT32 allows much larger hard drives, file sizes and numbers of files to be supported. Windows has a limit of 32GB when you ask it to format a drive as FAT32. However, I use a freeware program called Easeus to handle partitions and it also allows you to format drives > 32GB as FAT32. I formatted my drive as FAT32 with 32KB clusters. There may be other ways to do this.

WMA Lossless files:
I like WMA Lossless for several reasons - 1. This is the only Lossless format that BMW supports with the exception of WAV files. 2. WMA Lossless supports tags, so you can select music by Artist, Genre, etc . . . WAV files do not support tags. 3. WMA Lossless are smaller than WAV by at least 50% and provide the same quality. It takes several minutes for the car to read the drive when you first connect it, but each subsequent time ( for instance if you add songs ) is much faster.

Creating WMA Lossless from other formats:
I use foobar2000 for my computer music collection and there is a converter available that will convert flac or wav into WMA Lossless. There may be other ways to do this. Hydrogenaudio Forums - Portal is a great web site for information about computer based music.

If you wish more details, send me a PM or I can post more.

I tried a 250gb WD Passport some time ago and needed a Y cable to boost the power from the lighter socket to get it to work.

Thanks jamesboags. That answers one of the questions that I had. So you suffered no problems with that setup?

Bit of time on connection for it to establish itself... but ok other than that.. I have a 160 gb ipod connected now ....

I use a thumb drive with MP3s at 192kbs.
Over 1000 songs with room to spare on an 8 gig drive.
It's small and flips out of the way.