Not sure if this has been discussed in too much detail, but I did some experimenting and here are my results.

Bought a 750Gig External HDD (portable) which is only powered by usb.
Formatted it to FAT32, loaded about 80Gb of music and hooked it up
to my USB port. It recognizes the drive as a USB Flash and begins to play the music, no problems at all. I also formatted a smaller 40Gb Drive similarly and hooked it up no problems.

This may be an alternative to those who don't want to keep their Ipod or Iphone hooked up to the USB port for a more Permanent solution.

The upside is you can buy a 320Gb portable drive for around $60 and have days of music, the downside is there is no way to sort the music or make playlists so you are stuck fishing through folders.
Unless of course you make your fav mix and put it all in the first folder.

 

The real issue with just using a gigantic HDD is the built-in limitation on the number of folders and files that the car's system will even read. At some point, you may be better off just burning some DVD-DL's (at 8 Gb each). A mere 5000 music files won't begin to dent the capacity of a 750Gb HDD, so most of the space will go to waste.

For the 2010 model, the file limits are as follows:

Without Nav
Folder levels: 8, Folders and files: 999 (Max. 255 files for one folder)

With Nav
Folder levels: 8, Folders: 512 (including root folder), Files: 5,000

 

also why not just buy one of the ocz SSD and put in a usb powered enclosure. then you dont have to worry about shock damage over time. the 60 gig ones are not that expensive. You dont have to worry about trim b/c you will only be reading from the drive.

 

+1 about not worrying about TRIM for read only.

And if the limit is 5k songs, even if you use 320kbps MP3s (estimate 8MB each) you will only reach about 40GB.

On that note, Slickdeals shows $20 off an Agility:
60GB OCZ 2.5" SATA II Agility 2 Solid State Drive (SSD) - Slickdeals.net

 

The bigger problem for me is not being able to browse through folders/files while playing another song. I gave up and ended up getting an old ipod. I am sure Apple paid a bunch of money to Inifiniti to keep it this way.

 

So one root folder with 8 subfolders is the max?

 

No, the max of "8" applies to tree levels.

 

i am loading up a thumb drive right now.
i have folders of mp3 with playlist titles.
do I drop the various folders into the thumbdrive and call it a day.
or do the various folders need to be in a solo folder inside the thumbdrive.

 

^ btw i have a 2010 with nav

 

Thats news to me, I always thought you could only burn CD's. I'm going to give the DVD a try. I have an Ipod, but I don't like putting albums with various artists on it because it clutters up my Artist directory. I usually just put them on cds or thumb drives.

 

the problem with a big drive is that it might take forever for it to do the initial scan after starting up the car. Not sure if SSD is any faster (because it could be the Infiniti's system being slow, not the harddrive itself)