Yes! You can play the contents of a USB hard drive, or, for best performance, you can copy files from an external hard drive to the Aurender local/internal storage. There are a few ways to do this:
If you do not need to see metadata tags like album cover art, you can just connect a USB HDD or Flash Drive to one of the USB data ports on the back of the Aurender. You can then use the "Folder" menu option to browse and play files from the USB device by folder view.
*Note that we have found a few DACs are not compatible with Aurender when used with an external USB device (playing from internal storage or a NAS drive does work). The following devices have known issues when music is played from a USB drive- Ayre QB-9 USB DAC, Grace Design m903, Berkeley Alpha USB(USB to SPDIF converter).
*Also note that Aurender music servers can only address USB drives with a single partition. If the drive has multiple partitions, then it will not work and will need to be formatted for one partition.