The Mele is really a nice mini computer but Android is sometimes a bit weird; when connecting a hard drive through the embedded sata port, media players are reluctant to scan it, making it difficult to launch movies or music from it.
I tweaked Android a bit so that it thinks that main storage is the hard drive. This way media players are working perfectly. (Now I've another issue, the HDD is always spinning, never stopping, even in sleep mode.)
To do so I edited the vold.fstab file in /etc
# Mounts the first usable partition of the specified device #/devices/platform/awsmc.3/mmc_host for sdio dev_mount sdcard /mnt/sdcard auto /devices/platform/sw_ahci.0 dev_mount sata /mnt/sata auto /devices/virtual/block/nandk dev_mount extsd /mnt/extsd auto /devices/platform/sunxi-mmc.0/mmc_host dev_mount usbhost0 /mnt/usbhost0 auto /devices/platform/sw-ehci.1/usb1/1-1/1-1.2 dev_mount usbhost1 /mnt/usbhost1 auto /devices/platform/sw-ehci.1/usb1/1-1/1-1.1 dev_mount usbhost2 /mnt/usbhost2 auto /devices/platform/sw-ehci.1/usb1/1-1/1-1.3 dev_mount usbhost3 /mnt/usbhost3 auto /devices/platform/sw-ehci.1/usb1/1-1/1-1.4
Actually switched /devices/platform/sw_ahci.0 and /devices/virtual/block/nandk
For reference I'm using this build: apollo_mele-eng 4.0.4 IMM76D 20120607 test-key
Now if I could find a way to make the darn HDD sleep :)
edit: after trying for almost a day, I couldn't find a way to get it to sleep. It doesn't change anything if the drive is connected through USB or SATA or if sdcard and sata are exchanged; the drive would always spin on standby. It's not that bad after all; the drive consumption is around 2.5 W, with Mele this still makes between 5W (idle) and 10W (running). Don't know how it will affect the drive longevity though.