What specs should I look for in a USB thumb drive for my 2022
 

I looked in the manual, and can't find anything about maximum size or anything.

Thanks.

I have this 64GB one and it works great.


The second Gen minis were capped at 32GB from what I remember, but I've never seen anything about the max for a 3rd gen.

Sorry - potential dummy question here. What do you use a thumb drive for in our F56 models? Is it just for music playlists, or something else? Thanks!

I have music on mine in folders sorted by artist then albums.

One of these came in the care package MINI sent when I bought the car.


https://mediapool.bmwgroup.com/downl...Big&quality=90

From general experience, not from the MINI, I prefer USB drives that have a cable, because in some situations a USB key takes a lot of heat from the device it is plugged in to and gets destroyed. Maybe try a USB extension cable.

Also, I recall the MINI has a pretty low power output, not every device can be powered by the MINI, or recharge quickly.

I've never had this problem in my 20 years of owning MINIs.

↑ Same here. Never ever heard of 'low power' output.

'Low power' in the context of general power supply via a USB jack boils down to the fact that the amount of power output you can pull from a USB jack depends on the spec, and older specs provide less power. 'Low power' is simply a bit of a simplified description of what you see in older stuff compared to newer and more pervasive. It commonly gets called 'low' when someone encounters an older-spec-limited jack.

Even new (as in the headunit is new, but the model design is nevertheless older) radio headunits pretty routinely use older-spec jacks than what people are used to intersecting with in, say, laptops that are at Best Buy right now.

For doing things like charging phones (with ever-newer phones requiring more voltage and current to meaningfully charge while simultaneously being used, for example), this matters. The USB jack on my 2017 F56S, for example, is not going to be great for charging the latest and greatest iPhone. But for devices engineered to work with lowest-common-denominator USB jacks, this should not matter at all. Thumb drives are such lowest-common-denominator devices, so this power Q should -- emphasis on should -- pretty much not matter at all.

From a data standpoint, I have seen situations where USB 3.x drives do not work on equipment that "topped out" at USB 2.0. IIRC this is due to fundamental filesystem limitations that only show up when you get to drive capacities that literally do not exist on USB 2.0 drives (because they can't -- related filesystem-spec changes were incorporated into 3.x to allow bigger sizes). Anyone familiar with the mathematical guts of FAT vs FAT32 vs NTFS vs blah blah will be familiar with this.

That filesystem-discussion tangent aside: I would not specifically expect any USB 2.0 or higher drive to have issues in the USB jack of any F-series MINI (which, to be clear, is a jack wired exclusively to and powered by the headunit). Possible that the headunit might not like one specific flavor or manufacturer of a USB 3.x thumb drive, but actually encountering such a snafu would seriously surprise me, and if bitten I would simply get a drive from a different manufacturer and test.

In a related note I have for years had my music loaded on a USB stick plugged into my F56 Mini and it works great...except for Playlists. Seems like it can't read any file path with a space in it (be it the sub-folder or the song name). Does anyone know the correct way to format Playlists to get them to work?