[b1gandy]

What's the largest HDD that anyone has used? I want to try this so I can have a bigger music collection but unsure how big I can go.
I have a 2014 HK NBT system so can't use an SSD.

On the SSD temp sensor issue, has anyone tried the adapter that is used on MAC hardware when swapping out the HDD for an SSD?

https://www.flexxmemory.co.uk/access...012-and-later/

I have never taken the NBT unit apart so don't shout at me if this adapter won't fit.

[Zheez]

Originally Posted by dangerus_car

man, reading thread with HDD failure due to foam cleaner make me warry of getting my AC evaporator cleaned. i want to clean the evap due to age 7 years old car..

what should i do? one possible way is to take out the HU first, then foam cleaner, then put it back on after it's done?

Probably not a bad thing to do. Doesn't take long to take the head unit out and then you know there's no worry of it destroying your head unit or drive.

Originally Posted by b1gandy

What's the largest HDD that anyone has used? I want to try this so I can have a bigger music collection but unsure how big I can go.
I have a 2014 HK NBT system so can't use an SSD.

On the SSD temp sensor issue, has anyone tried the adapter that is used on MAC hardware when swapping out the HDD for an SSD?

https://www.flexxmemory.co.uk/access...012-and-later/

I have never taken the NBT unit apart so don't shout at me if this adapter won't fit.

I've used a 500GB, 750GB and a 1TB drive. But it doesn't actually give you any more space for music - it only allows for 20GB if I remember rightly. There's no noticeable benefit to putting a larger drive in which is a shame.

As for the temp adapter, it won't fit because the SATA connection is fixed in place and the drive slots in on to it. I'm also sure it won't work anyway because the NBT unit itself looks for the temperature value in the drive's SMART values. SSDs don't use the same SMART attribute for temperature that hard drives do so it doesn't get a report for it. The adapter provides a physical temperature sensor but that doesn't solve the SMART problem unfortunately.

[b1gandy]

Originally Posted by Zheez

SSDs don't use the same SMART attribute for temperature that hard drives do so it doesn't get a report for it. The adapter provides a physical temperature sensor but that doesn't solve the SMART problem unfortunately.

Do you know if it's Attribute 194 that the system checks? If so Crucial SSD's do report this.

https://uk.crucial.com/support/artic...20periodically.

[Zheez]

Apparently NBT does indeed require it to be on 194 and the problem is that most SSDs report it on 190.

That is interesting, although that link does say it's for the temperature on PCIe which would mean M.2 drives. I've got some SATA Crucial SSDs somewhere so I'll dig them out and take a look when I get a chance.

[b1gandy]

Originally Posted by Zheez

Apparently NBT does indeed require it to be on 194 and the problem is that most SSDs report it on 190.

That is interesting, although that link does say it's for the temperature on PCIe which would mean M.2 drives. I've got some SATA Crucial SSDs somewhere so I'll dig them out and take a look when I get a chance.

I also found this which seems to back up the 194 attribute:

https://kb.acronis.com/content/9129?ckattempt=1

I would be interested as an SSD would remove any issues with shock damage but I appreciate it won't solve any issues with speed or space for music.

[Zheez]

Absolutely. I'm away from home for a few days this week but I'll hopefully give it a go with my wife's car's NBT unit for next weekend. Thanks for the heads up. It's worth checking out.

Original NBT HD is 200GB and I've got a 240GB and a 500GB Crucial drive kicking around somewhere that I can use so I'll experiment.

[b1gandy]

Originally Posted by Zheez

Absolutely. I'm away from home for a few days this week but I'll hopefully give it a go with my wife's car's NBT unit for next weekend. Thanks for the heads up. It's worth checking out.

Original NBT HD is 200GB and I've got a 240GB and a 500GB Crucial drive kicking around somewhere that I can use so I'll experiment.

No worries, I have a couple of them knocking around too. I am a MAC/Linux user so could do with a hand making a duplicate drive as I have never tried it and whilst I am five with VirtualBox on Ubuntu I haven't used it on Windows. In fact I don't have a Windows machine so will probably need to build one.

[eff32fl]

Originally Posted by Zheez

Probably not a bad thing to do. Doesn't take long to take the head unit out and then you know there's no worry of it destroying your head unit or drive.




I've used a 500GB, 750GB and a 1TB drive. But it doesn't actually give you any more space for music - it only allows for 20GB if I remember rightly. There's no noticeable benefit to putting a larger drive in which is a shame.

As for the temp adapter, it won't fit because the SATA connection is fixed in place and the drive slots in on to it. I'm also sure it won't work anyway because the NBT unit itself looks for the temperature value in the drive's SMART values. SSDs don't use the same SMART attribute for temperature that hard drives do so it doesn't get a report for it. The adapter provides a physical temperature sensor but that doesn't solve the SMART problem unfortunately.

You should be able to use a bigger drive just as long as you increase the partition size for whichever is used for the music folder.

[Zheez]

I played around with extending the size of all partitions on my drive but the NBT unit still reports 20480MB, so exactly 20GB. None of the stock partitions are 20GB either - they're 1.2GB, 46GB, 17GB and 121GB. Media partition is the 46GB one and I assume that's where ripped music goes to. I didn't try copying any music to it after I expanded it though, so it could be that I could dump some music on there and it doesn't start actually reporting any usage until I get below 20GB because the firmware isn't aware of it. I'll mess about with this when I start trying out the Crucial drive soon.

[NxTH]

I have a couple of questions related to this.

1. My hard drive still works on a '13 model. Would it be wise to get a new hard drive now and make a clone of it, and swap it in? As I understand, that would be way easier than to wait for it to break?
2. Has anyone got an SSD to work in its place, or do I need to find a HDD?
3. If I at some point upgrade to an android platform, does the HDD still need to work? Let's say the HDD dies, and I get an android screen, does it fully work or is my iDrive side still dead?

[Zheez]

I did that with my car. Hard drive was working perfectly fine, but as it's a 2015 car I copied everything off the drive and replaced it before I had any issues. With a drive approaching 9 years old failure is much more likely.

I still haven't got round to trying the Crucial SSD, but I do have the 240GB one mentioned in previous posts sat on my desk right now. I'll hopefully prep this up tomorrow to give it a quick go. Not holding out much hope but what @b1gandy mentions does look promising.

Android HU will still work if the BMW HU dies. Sort of. The BMW unit does need to be at least functional enough to allow aux in to work. So if the head unit is constantly rebooting (which is how the drive in my wife's NBT unit first showed signs of failure) then you'll lose sound while it's rebooting.

[NxTH]

Originally Posted by Zheez

I did that with my car. Hard drive was working perfectly fine, but as it's a 2015 car I copied everything off the drive and replaced it before I had any issues. With a drive approaching 9 years old failure is much more likely.

I still haven't got round to trying the Crucial SSD, but I do have the 240GB one mentioned in previous posts sat on my desk right now. I'll hopefully prep this up tomorrow to give it a quick go. Not holding out much hope but what @b1gandy mentions does look promising.

Android HU will still work if the BMW HU dies. Sort of. The BMW unit does need to be at least functional enough to allow aux in to work. So if the head unit is constantly rebooting (which is how the drive in my wife's NBT unit first showed signs of failure) then you'll lose sound while it's rebooting.

What drive did you get, the Toshiba? So you used cloning software and that was it, or did you have to do something else? Read somewhere that plugging it into any PC will corrupt the disk.

[Zheez]

Yes I've replaced drives in a few NBT units using a Toshiba MQ01ABD 500GB drive (MQ01ABD050).

I didn't use cloning software, but I instead used QNX to copy the contents of the 4 partitions off on to another drive. Then I used QNX to partition and format the new drive then just copied the files/folders back to their relevant partitions and put the drive back in the NBT unit. All worked great. As long as you use QNX you're fine but I don't think Windows etc would cause any problems anyway as the drive is password locked as soon as it goes into an NBT unit.

[NxTH]

Originally Posted by Zheez

Yes I've replaced drives in a few NBT units using a Toshiba MQ01ABD 500GB drive (MQ01ABD050).

I didn't use cloning software, but I instead used QNX to copy the contents of the 4 partitions off on to another drive. Then I used QNX to partition and format the new drive then just copied the files/folders back to their relevant partitions and put the drive back in the NBT unit. All worked great. As long as you use QNX you're fine but I don't think Windows etc would cause any problems anyway as the drive is password locked as soon as it goes into an NBT unit.

Sent a PM regarding instructions.

The instructions in your other posts are a bit too vague for someone not familiar with qnx, I'd need pretty specific steps. Let me know if the SSD works. I'd rather not put another HDD in.

On another note, has anyone tried to straight up use a Dock with two slots and just pressing the Clone button with zero software? I'm wondering if this would work in a situation where the old drive is still operational.

[Zheez]

Replied to your PM. Hopefully it helps.

I don't know if a drive clone would actually work or not. My gut feeling is no, because the drive is password locked via ATA commands which makes things more difficult. You can get the password and unlock the drive and then it may work at that point. But any drive that goes back in to an NBT unit gets auto ATA locked again.

[NxTH]

Originally Posted by Zheez

Replied to your PM. Hopefully it helps.

I don't know if a drive clone would actually work or not. My gut feeling is no, because the drive is password locked via ATA commands which makes things more difficult. You can get the password and unlock the drive and then it may work at that point. But any drive that goes back in to an NBT unit gets auto ATA locked again.

I see, makes sense. If your SSD swap is successful, mind posting separate steps especially for the cylinder values and the SSD itself? Though now that I'm looking at this, looks like a few places do the SSD setup for you for 100 bucks remotely after you put the disk in the car. Might be worth it.

[zrile]

Is it possible to clone the disk,before original in car dies? I cloned my windows hdd once, to avoid reinstalling windows and it works great, without any installations etc. Is it possible to clone car hdd as well, to save myself from all this steps above? I think my hdd is dying, because few days ago my hu restarted in the middle of the ride, on a smooth road.

[fe7565]

Wondering, if any updates on that SSD with temp output potentially working for use in the NBT?

[eff32fl]

Originally Posted by zrile

Is it possible to clone the disk,before original in car dies? I cloned my windows hdd once, to avoid reinstalling windows and it works great, without any installations etc. Is it possible to clone car hdd as well, to save myself from all this steps above? I think my hdd is dying, because few days ago my hu restarted in the middle of the ride, on a smooth road.

Yes clone it while you can if you think you're having hard drive problems. The new drive installation doesn't include Gracenote or map data restoration.

[gameson]

Originally Posted by eff32fl

Yes clone it while you can if you think you're having hard drive problems. The new drive installation doesn't include Gracenote or map data restoration.

How do you clone a HU HDD? I am thinking of doing it to save me headache, buy a SSD, clone it, then use the SSD and keep original HDD as backup.

Also what SSD would you recommend to use on a NBT EVO HW ver 4.x? And would it be to my advantage to use bigger SSD?

Thank you.

[NxTH]

Originally Posted by zrile

Is it possible to clone the disk,before original in car dies? I cloned my windows hdd once, to avoid reinstalling windows and it works great, without any installations etc. Is it possible to clone car hdd as well, to save myself from all this steps above? I think my hdd is dying, because few days ago my hu restarted in the middle of the ride, on a smooth road.

I have NBT, not Evo as I understand.

I was wondering the same thing recently, and ended up giving up on the idea. I did a lot of research, or so I thought, and kept encountering new issues and sides to cloning the drive.

You can't just pop the drive into a dock and hit clone, the drive is locked. Unlocking it requires that you know how to manage an ssh connection to the vehicle. You can get someone to do it for you, but sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. When it's unlocked, you must immediately take it out and bring it to your dock, and only then you'll see if the unlock worked. Sounds like a pain.

After all this nonsense, I decided that maybe I'll just buy a new drive and have someone code it for me. I contacted maybe 6 people/companies. Some of them said "well, we can't do it for NBT. It needs to be NBT Evo". Some of them said "I'll give you a hard drive pre-coded, but you need the latest ilevel or it doesn't work." Gave them my ilevel and asked if that was the correct one, and they said they "don't know". Updating the ilevel as I understand, can lock the DME for tunes, and wipe all coding and such so that's already more hassle than it's worth.

One company said they would find a solution for me, and forwarded the issue to someone who never contacted me.

I then found out that there's an .iso file that someone has, that I can just write to a new disk and it would just write all the sectors and partitions. It would work on any NBT and software version. Contacted the guy to ask for it and he never responded. Why some of these methods work for certain software and some don't, I have no clue.

Then there's this thread, which even working in the industry of computer science, I'm far too busy to figure out how all of this works, I haven't really done anything this specific before. I even got the extra instructions to go with these, but even with those, I have more questions than answers and I would just be a bother to the person if I asked him to spell out every step to me.

I've also been told you can't even use an SSD for non-Evo. They don't have the needed parameter for temperature, which the HU is looking for. It would be advisable to buy a hard drive specifically manufactured for automotive usage that can take the heat, cold, and vibration as well as shock. At least for me, since I'm in Finland with cold winters. I would not trust a generic hard drive to last long.

At this point I had spent a few weeks on this and decided it was too much.

I guess I'll tackle this when the drive actually dies. Most HDD's die in their first few years of running anyway.

If someone can actually help in this matter, I'd gladly hear it.

[zrile]

Originally Posted by gameson

How do you clone a HU HDD? I am thinking of doing it to save me headache, buy a SSD, clone it, then use the SSD and keep original HDD as backup.

Also what SSD would you recommend to use on a NBT EVO HW ver 4.x? And would it be to my advantage to use bigger SSD?

Thank you.

There is windows program for cloning hdd's, i don't remember now the name (google knows), but in few yes yes next next options, very user friendly program does everything, so i think if i clone, not copy/paste hdd, i might save myself a little fortune. When you look at the HU side, with its locked options and files, even windows has some locked and hidden files and folders and program does its job. 🤷🏻‍♂️