Thank you guys. Will remove the USB Tesla stick, and check size. If it's 128Gb, will try to dump my music there (only 4.34Gb), and see if it works. Supposedly, it should pick it up, but we'll see. Otherwise, would have to do a partition, which I obviously don't know how to do. Ha ha.
AFAIK music must be on a separate partition
Hey gang, one question: When I click on the sentry icon, the red button in the middle turns on. However, if I go to 'safety and security', it's not turned on. What's the deal with that? Do I need to turn it on there? And if yes, can I turn it on and off from the screen, by touching the icon? I only want to use it when I click on the icon. Don't want it all the time, since it not only uses juice, but doesn't allow the car to sleep. We'd only use it in certain situations. Thx.
There's 2 different icons. Folks sometime misunderstand the system.
One is kinda square/rectangle and is the dashcam icon. If there's a red dot there, it's recording. It requires the USB storage device to record.
This is the
only feature that records video. Sentry DOES NOT.
Then there's the sentry icon, which is a circle. It has a red dot when IT is on.
It can be on even without ANY USB storage- because again, it does not record video.
What it DOES do is keep the car awake when it's on. Which means DASHCAM, if turned on, will record video continuously just like it always does any time the car is awake.
Then, if sentry goes to alert mode, it'll move the last 10 minutes of dashcam video to the sentry folder.
Sometimes folks just see that sentry icon on and mistakenly think it's recording. You need dashcam for that.
That said- a USB stick is
just fine
Folks grossly overestimate how much the 4 720p cameras are recording.
A 128GB stick should be good for like 5+ years with 8-10 hours a day of use based on typical lifecycle of the flash memory. (the detailed math on this has been provided, many times, in other threads)- so no need to replace the one that comes with the car (if it did come with a 128)
SSDs draw more power, take up more space, and are typically rated for a narrowed range of temperatures than USB sticks too.... with basically no upside at all for this purpose unless you really need to pass your dashcam video down to your grandkids... (in which case get a max endurance SDcard- it's also massive overkill for normal retention lengths, but at least doesn't have the 3 SSD drawbacks I listed).
Now- if you had a HUGE music collection (like >256GB) then an SSD is the only economic choice- otherwise it's bringing a nuke to a knife fight.