R5X USB Flash Drive Size Limit?
 

Hi all-

I've been using a 128GB flash drive in my R59 for the past six years, to great effect. Once you learn to work around the limitations of the sorting logic, the interface on the (nav-equipped) R5X series really isn't bad.

Anyway, after all these years, my music collection has finally grown bigger than my current drive will accommodate, so yesterday I grabbed a 256GB drive and loaded it up about halfway.

But the MINI won't recognize it. For the most part, it just acts like there's no drive plugged in, but I did briefly see it flash "Not Supported" on the input selection screen.

My first thought was that maybe it was formatted NTFS, but...nope, it's exFAT, which is about as widely compatible as you're gonna find.

So...anyone know if 128GB is the biggest drive this system will recognize? Or has anyone successfully gotten their car to recognize larger drives? My googling didn't turn up any definitive answers.

TLDR: Is there a known size limit on flash drives for the post-refresh 2nd-Gen MINIs?

I can't comment on the R59, but I know my R56 has a limit. I don't recall off hand what it was, but it was stated in the owners manual.

Problem solved! I took a look at the most recent 128GB drive that I'd been using and saw that it was actually formatted FAT32, not exFAT. Formatting a drive that large in that way is unusual, and a bit of a faff (on a windows machine, anyway; I didn't check on MacOS) but despite what you might read elsewhere, it's TOTALLY DOABLE.

So, I went through the steps and reformatted the 256GB drive to FAT32, et voila! It works. Takes forever to index, but it works!

Thankfully, my music collection is only growing by about 4GB/yr -- hell, the fact that I still BUY music in 2019 seems to make me an outlier -- so it will be a good long time before I have to worry about whether all the above will work with a 512GB drive...