iTunes and External USB drive

G’day, I am wondering if the following is possible. I currently run iTunes on a PC, it plays my music from a 2 TB external hard drive connected to the PC. If I buy an Apple TV and run Flash on it, can I unplug my 2TB drive from my PC and then simply USB connect it to the ATV Flash and have iTunes on the ATV play it? (The reason for this is I do not run a home network and really want to use the HDMI output on the ATV Flash to connect to my AV receiver and get the PC out of the equation)

I assume I will need to set ATV Flash primary drive to external to make this work (However I am concerned about this part of the process as it appears when you do this it prompts to format that drive – I obviously do not want to wipe my all my music so is there also a way around this? http://wiki.atvflash.com/index.php?title=USB_Storage)

I do not plan on connecting the ATV Flash up to the NET and downloading on to this drive, I just want to run it is a great big music player and use an iTouch as a remote control to browse and control iTtunes.

Sorry if this seems a bit remedial, new to this. I’ve read a lot of stuff about syncing, and playing video content, but nothing that seems to clarify what I am trying to do… or perhaps I do not fully understand it!
Cheers
Drodley

Actually due to how iTunes syncs media to the AppleTV, in order to sync large amounts of files you will need to have the media stored both on your PC (external drive) and the AppleTV (external drive).