Oh! That’s awesome Joe! Glad to hear you figured out something that works for you man. Yea they make USB drives that come in all different sizes nowadays that have incredibly large capacities, I think you can even find some on Amazon that have a full Terrabyte! (1000 Gigabytes) which is a little over 30 times the amount of the one you have now. Of course the really nice ones will be pretty expensive at that capacity just because they probably have super high speed capabilities, but I seriously doubt you would need one with such high speed ratings for music files, you should be fine Wu try a cheap one. The high speed ones are typically used for trying to run crazy complicated development software on your computer that is too large of a file or to fit on the computer itself or the computer can’t handle the processing power of the program. If you do look for a new one, I suggest looking for a cheaper one (around $30-40) with a reasonable capacity upgrade for your needs (256GB should be more than enough unless your music files are downloaded in high fidelity, then I might consider another step up to 512GB) and then try to find one in that size that’s USB 3.0. The 3.0 is considered high speed (transfer rate of about 5GB per second). Technically you probably don’t even need a 3.0, you could probably get away with a 2.0, but I figure better safe than sorry and the 3.0 ones are cheap enough these days. There are even 3.1 USB’s as well with transfer rates at 10GB per second, but unless you also plan on using this thing for other tasks on a computer, you really don’t need a 3.1.
Some of that may be more than you needed to know, but I tried to explain as best as I could so you know what you’re looking for. If you use Amazon to search for one just type “256GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive” in the search bar and there should be endless pages of them listed. The first number in the search followed by the GB is your capacity or amount of storage. USB stands for Universal Serial Bus which just refers to the name of the type of port/connection. The 3.0 number just refers to the generation and speed of the device. And a “flash drive” is just the name/term used for these smaller devices that store data on them, opposed to say an “External Hard drive” which looks more like a brick or bigger rectangle device that’s capable of holding even more storage and transfers at even higher speeds.
If your wife is tech savvy enough, and the issue persists where you cannot see the files on the device, it may be beneficial to wipe the drive and reformat it to what they call FAT-32. This formatting allows both windows and Apple(Mac) files to be written and read and unless this is done when you first get the device, usually flash drives are formatted to only work with windows computers. I’m not sure if you’re using ITunes to transfer the songs or not, but that could be your issue as well with not being able to read the drive. It is also possible for the opposite to happen where the device comes pre formatted for Macs. And it is also possible that the drive has somehow been corrupted and may need to be reformatted to be able to function properly.
I understand this is a lot to take in. Lol but take everything I’ve said with a grain of salt, I am in no way a computer expert. I have only learned what I know from my own research in trying to buy the best quality products and troubleshooting my own problems.
Please don’t hesitate to ask anything else on the subject, it’s always a pleasure to help a fellow rider.
P.S. I had read another forum on here earlier that said they were having trouble with their USB playing songs on the ride command and the later comments figured out that it was due to the loose connection of the device itself. So just for future reference if this ever happens, they said they were able to resolve this by squeezing the USB flash drive with pliers to bend it a bit to make a tighter connection. Otherwise other riders had solved the same issue by simply buying a different USB flash drive that fit better because it was just a hair bigger, taller, or wider somehow.
Again, best wishes man, I’m glad the oldies are kickin again and I hope the wife feels better soon!
-Chris