[AGT SMTH]

So this is really weird... I have a 2009 LCI E90 with 6FL, no Logic 7. Now that the amps/speakers are finally done (lotsa boom) I'm experimenting with USB flash drives.

The stereo works great with faster and/or less-fully-loaded thumb drives, but whenever I add a larger and/or slower drive, after 10-30 minutes of listening to music suddenly the left channels completely cut off. This is after I've given it some time to scan the drive and re-index everything. It'll stay off for days even in radio mode or with the thumb drive unplugged--until I plug in a different (faster) drive that doesn't have many songs on it, and all of a sudden all channels work again. For this reason I'm concluding there's nothing wrong with my wiring, amps, or speakers--there's something going on with the head unit.

One particular culprit is a Corsair Voyager 64 GB (not the GT model). On PC benchmarks with this particular drive I get a 24.3 MB/sec read speed which really isn't bad. (Write speed is an agonizing 6.3 MB/sec but I didn't think that mattered in a car.) I added 35 GB of 320 kbps CBR MP3's and not only did it take over two hours to index but the left channels failed after maybe 10 minutes of actually listening to music. Turned the car off, unplugged the drive, came back an hour later and plugged in a Corsair Voyager 32 GB with a 29.5 MB/sec benchmark and only 100 MP3's loaded and it sings again. Works great for days in this scenario.

Huh???

I understand 35 GB is a lot but I've seen posts here where folks are talking about entire hard drives with hundreds of gigs--and I certainly wouldn't think too many songs should cause half of the channels to fail. Sluggish response time maybe, but this?

Is it time for a trip to the dealer for a firmware upgrade?

Anyone seen this before?