I currently play most of my music directly from my laptop and would like to replace this with a dedicated machine just for playing music (ideally with less fan noise too). My music is mostly flac files (~400gb) stored a basic 1TB external usb hard drive so I'm looking for something that could play the files from that or store that much music (the more expensive option I'm guessing. The player would feed into an Onkyo TX SR608 AV receiver used with B&W 685 speakers.
I think the best solution I've seen is the Logitech squeezebox touch (can anyone confirm that this would do what I want it to?) or one of the Sonos offerings (again I'm not particularly bothered about the wireless capabilities but I think it would do what I want?).
Are there any other alternatives I should look at?
Assuming that you want a device which will extract files from your usb drive and output them via S/PDIF or analog outs to your receiver I can confirm that the Touch will do what you want it to do. However there seems to be a developing consensus amongst users (on the slimdevices forum) that the Touch works much more reliably streaming via wifi or ethernet from a server running squeezebox server (like earlier squeezeboxes), rather than relying on the stripped down version which can (in theory) run on the Touch itself. When I tried using a directly attached usb drive and no external server it kept hanging and stuttering. Lots of people (though not everyone) reported the same.
The external server can be an ordinary windows pc or laptop (or Mac equivalent), or it can be a NAS drive or a stripped down plug sized machine or whatever. This enables you to use a large number of plugins which will not work with Touch running its own server software. You can even implement DRC via a plugin, although this requires a server with a decent processor (not most NAS drives).
I can't comment on any other solutions.