Our friends at Bimmerfile are reporting that the next generation iDrive system will be getting an internal 40GB hard drive. According to them and Jonnathan Spira, a journalist for BMWCAA, the new and improved navigation system will include a 40-gigabyte hard disk drive.

The interesting fact lays in the way BMW has decided to partition the hard drive which apparently was partitioned as follows:

  • Operating System 2GB
  • Music 3GB
  • Entertainment server 8GB
  • Navigation map data 12GB
  • Telephone (name and address) 10GB
  • Reserve 5GB

Also, the screen will have a wopping 1280×480 resolution which will give the driver a crispier text. Favorites buttons, introduced on the E60 5er Series facelift, will continue although it is likely we’ll see a new menu structure and improved language support. 

 I find it a little disturbing that they decided to allocate 10GB to the Address Book. It seems a large amount of memory allocated for entries that will contain text only and I would have honestly allocated more space to the Music and Entertainment sections. 

Full article on the iDrive can be found on Bimmerfile