so I don't have a USB port in the center console (no IPOD options were selected) so I am guessing if I put in a USB HDD into the glove box it won't provide power to spin the drive, right? I guess that put's me back at the begining of the thread, any way to upgrade the built in HDD to a larger size?

You should be able to buy a USB hard drive enclosure that takes a 12V DC power supply. For wiring, you may be able to find one with a cigarette light adapter already but if not, you could easily make your own with a cheap cigarette lighter adapter piece.

e.g. Walmart.com: Inland u-Jam IDE -USB 3.5" Hard Drive Enclosure: Computers

Looking for some help on playing music from a USB key in the centre console from iDrive (2010 idrive).

I have a full 16G USB key, and each time I start the car, iDrive takes about 10 minutes to index the USB key before displaying the available music files for playback.

Does everyone have the same problem, or is there a way to do this so that iDrive doesn't re-index everytime? I'm downloading music files to the USB key via windows media player.

I won't bother with the idrive hardisk if I can get this working without an extended delay each time I start the car.

I keep the hard disk inside the car and don't take it in/out each day. It starts up within 10 seconds in most cases and immediately continues where it left off. Not surprising it would take a little longer than solid state storage like a USB stick.

I can't stress how much I love the USB hard disk and how well it works. Thanks again to stimulate on pushing me that way.

jammit, I suspect what's happening for you is that every time you stick the USB stick into your computer, there is some kind of update happening on it. Then when you stick it into the BMW, it realizes there are changes and needs to scan the whole stick for changes.

After it does the index once, can you try stopping the car, taking out the key, sticking it in and starting again. What happens? My expectation is that it would work within seconds.

I've had a closer look at this problem:
I leave the USB stick plugged in between trips. When I start the car it takes 2 minutes to start playback of the last song. At this point I can access all the songs in that album or folder. It takes 5 minutes to be able to access all content on the USB stick.

If I turn-off the ignition and lock the car, it starts again on the 2/5min load time. If I don't lock the car, it starts playback instantly

The 2/5min load time is a big difference with the reported speed of the hard drives - 10 sec for playback?

I'm using a kingston USB with nominal 80Mbit/s read txfer. The WD passports would be at least 6times faster at 480Mbit/s assuming BMW uses USB2.0 - although this is another iDrive spec I can't find documented anywhere.

It looks like using a USB stick is the problem. One other possibility for the loading delay could be the file format.

I just synced my USB stick to Windows Media Player - I do not copy/paste the music folders & files. Not sure if this would make much difference though.

When you have a look at the files on the computer, are they organized by artist and album or in one big directory? Only other thing I can think of.

files are organised by artist/album on the PC & USB stick. Is this the same on the portable harddrive?

Same as me.

So I checked things more carefully today. I think it is in fact taking a long time to read all the files on car start. However, I never bother using the by artist, album etc. I just browse the directory to play albums one at a time (maybe you use playlists?). Anyway, you can browse the directories immediately and also it will continue from where it left off very quickly.

Looks like there are a number of considerations when using an external USB device - it is not as simple as first thought:

If using USB stick: - start playback of current song takes 2 minutes and loading of full song-list takes 5 minutes
If using USB disk: - start playback of current song takes 10sec? and loading of full song-list several minutes

It is possible to search the directory structure once initial playback has started, but fully indexed artist/albums/songs on iDrive takes longer.

Once other consideration I've noticed is that voice command/music search doesn't appear to work for the external drives.