Graham, I'm using the Electronics Product Online swivel USB OTG/Host adapter:
http://www.electronicproductonline.c...oducts_id=2043
It's plugged into a 1TB Western Digital hard drive and both media player and mplayer access it, directly, very fast. I like the hardware solution as there's nothing to load into what little memory it has. Divx movies used to stutter with the software USB Host switches, but this hardware dongle doesn't max out the CPU gage playing DivX, now.

Hope this helps....but mine are both N800's under Diablo.

What's crazy is I can load one of the 16GB SDHC cards in it FASTER plugging the big USB drive into the tablet's dongle, than the WinXP much faster box can load the 16GB SDHC plugged into a USB2 card adapter. Go figure...???