One of the gentleman I deal with at a local shop was telling me he hooked a external hard drive up to his deck (originally built for the computer). Now a days, most of the new external's run right off of the bus power from the USB. He was making it sound complicated, but just double check to see, or google it, but I tihnk any thumb drive, or external hard drive that runs off of bus power will work. For my next setup, I'll be using a thumb drive and about 320kbps (cd quality is around 128kbps) sound files for SQ.