I have a 2014 Accord EX. I cannot get the audio system to play music off of a external hard drive plugged into the usb port.

My setup:
-2.5inch SATA 320GB - Format is NTFS
-MP3 music files placed in a folder labeled 'Music'

I have had this work with a 60GB HDD? Why won't it work with larger HDD?

 

the harddrive is too big and the stereo is not powerful enough to process the information on it. they are really designed to work with flash drives. I am surprised that your 60gb works on it.

 

Damn. Maybe I will try partitioning the 320GB HDD. Maybe that will work....

 

usually, they need to be formatted as FAT32

 

I have a filled to max 64 GB SanDisk Jump drive that plays just fine. Sad that the accord factory head unit can handle playing mp3's off a jump drive better than most aftermarket head units that I tried at best buy in terms of access speed and file sorting structure. (Not that BB has great quality, but still.)

 

I copied my entire 20,000+ songs music library to a 240GB SSD Drive and I'm using it in my 2014 Accord Touring
It accesses every song, though it does take time to scroll the entire library.
Successfully used a 128GB Flash, an 80GB Platter Drive and a 240GB SSD drive. The key is to format your drive as a Fat32 drive. I use SmartDisk Fat32 Format Utility to format my drives and sticks on a windows 7 computer. The utility takes only a few seconds.
Hit me back and let me know if this works for you

 

nice move using a SSD - certainly the lower energy consumption allows the stock HU to power it easily and the higher speed allows for faster indexing.

the OP can get a USB cable that allows the HDD to be powered separately from the head unit. but index time will be quite high.

in reality, the best option is to limit USB size to 32GB and just have multiples for different genre. it's still faster than sorting through CD's.

 

Agreed. Using different sticks for different genres is a good idea.
I really wanted to just handle one device and keep swapping into and out of my USB port to a minimum.
90 percent of my usage is in track shuffle mode so I can pretty much set it, forget it, and get 69 24hr days of straight uninterrupted and unrepeated music
It would be great if it were searchable by genre or ipod level methods, but - oh well, I can't have it all

 

I copied my entire 20,000+ songs music library to a 240GB SSD Drive and I'm using it in my 2014 Accord Touring
It accesses every song, though it does take time to scroll the entire library.
Successfully used a 128GB Flash, an 80GB Platter Drive and a 240GB SSD drive. The key is to format your drive as a Fat32 drive. I use SmartDisk Fat32 Format Utility to format my drives and sticks on a windows 7 computer. The utility takes only a few seconds.
Hit me back and let me know if this works for you

UPDATE:: Checked various Civics, Pilots, and Accords in the dealership
So far only the units with Navigation seem to work with my SSD Drive, so it may be a power thing.
The salesman was fascinated by my little fact finding mission. Just as interested in the findings as I was.

 

I figured this out. I had to format my thumb drive to FAT32 with a different Operating system. Using OSX to format the thumb drive to FAT32 led to some problems. Windows 7 worked.