Iriver was my first mp3 player and I did like it a lot. Shame the battery life, which started out excellent, degraded so quickly. Has the battery improved much in the last 8 years?
The main problem with that though is that the largest storage is nowhere near what I am looking for.
I really thought there'd be something out there that would allow this but it seems impossible to play the tunes right off the drive without the giant TDK boom box.