teomcdohl

This is my first post in awhile as I've been pretty busy with work and other interests to really post lately. Besides that, I was a pretty big poster before I got my car, and once I got my car I stopped posting so much. I'm not quite sure, but anyway...

My car is a NBP 2008 TL-S, 6Spd. It's a fantastic car with tons of power (no rattles, although third gear seems to becoming a bit of a pain at 2200 miles, but I don't really care too much, if it gets too bad I'll just use synchromesh... although I haven't posted, I've been a diligent reader )

So, I was considering the navigation. I know Bysin created a nice hack awhile ago (what a smart kid, props to him) and angry dad also created a hack, based off the work of bysin. However, this isn't what my idea about is really.

I was noticing how slow the navi is at times, when starting up the car or calculating at times. I'm assuming that this is because two reasons.

1. The bus or whatever type of architecture that runs the DVD is slowing this down.
2. The DVD drive with its seek time is slowing it down.

So, I was thinking about that. Lately I've been ripping ipods open, reparing my own and others. One of my major gripes with the ipods is the fragility.If you drop it once, it could spell doom - this is not universal, I've seen ipods that have been dropped numerous times and have kept on ticking... but overall, the hard drives suck. That's not apples fault, its the way disk drives are designed.

I happen to remember that car companies used hard drives for navigation in the past. I think there are two reasons why they switched:

1. updates. easier to swap a dvd than update a HD.
2. fragility. hard drives are fragile, bumps in the road can kill a working hard drive pretty quick I'd imagine.

Since the newest apple thinger came out, the Macbook Air, I've looked into Solid State hard drives, and decided to switch my ipods over to SSD rather than conventional.

I'm wondering outloud - how much performance would be gained if a SSD was used instead of a DVD-ROM in the Acura Navigation? Anyone else interested in this Mod?

leedogg

I vaguely recall reading something about this before...probably in angrydad's navi hack thread.

I think he was looking at why the navi took so long to load up and said the limitation was in the crappy alpine navi software...

teomcdohl

The software could be a limitation, but I'd imagine that the DVD had something to do with it. If you were to upgrade that to a SSD, you should see gains... even upgrading to a hard drive (spinning at 7200) would see performance gains, although the fragility would scare me a little bit. The question is, how much of a gain would there be?

The mod wouldn't take too much work, you'd need to create and adapter and it should technically work.

Does anyone have the wiring for the cable to the DVD drive?

csmeance

the navi has no function for the SF card execpt for diagnostics. many have tried before but failed.

teomcdohl

The idea would be to completely replace the DVD drive with a flash card, not to use them in conjunction...

The operating system would just need some sort of driver that would support the hard drive, or something like that. I'm not 100% familiar with it, but I do think it can be done with enough research and preparation.

F.Rizzo

Great idea, ive wondered the same thing also because it has the same slowness in my RDX.
The whole system is slow to boot, I can back out of a parking space before the camera comes on the screen. I wish there was a way to add about 4GB more RAM to the system...

My wife's 2005 Benz Navi (DVD based) boots up in about 2 seconds.

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