Looking for a Personal music player > 160Gb.

I seem to post this about once a year. My iPod Classic 6 160Gb is now too small, to carry all my music. Unfortunately it's the largest that Apple make. It gets worse. 1.8" disks are available up to 250Gib or so but Apple used an unusual disk interface and the biggest disk available with that interface is 160. You can get a kit for the 5.5 and Video and there's even a guy in Edinburgh making the occasional 240Gb ipod from spare parts. But then you hit the next problem which is the software that limits the total number of tracks or runs out of index space for the metadata. It's unlikely that you will be able to fill that 240Gb with music.

Sales of the iPod Classic are dropping off. And people with this problem are a small minority so I can't see Apple doing anything about it. It's completely possible that the V6 is the last ever rev of the Classic and it might even get dropped completely. So working old ones are going to become like gold dust on eBay.

It's almost enough to make me start looking again for a (semi) pro-audio music player based on a 2.5" disk but I think iRiver and Archos (the most likely candidates) have dropped the ball as well. I'm unlikely to fill a standard 2.5" faster than the capacity is increasing. It's up to 500Gb now? I have a friend who throws a laptop and 2Tb 3.5" in his backpack with all his music on it. I'm nowhere near that extreme, but I'm not alone in outgrowing 160Gb.

Has anyone else got this problem, and ideally found a solution?

And please don't just say Spotify/Grooveshark/Google Music. For my uses, I want 192Kb VBR minimum and preferably 320Kb and I use it in places where network access is spotty at best. Any solution must involve local storage and be battery powered.