This is exactly what I do. And for the precise reason that I don't trust some cloud based third party service to not become unavailable for reasons beyond my control, which is exactly what's happened here. Disk storage and backup for 400-500GB of mp3 and aac is cheap.
It's possible to get it going even better than strong. I have an old 60GB iPod that I swapped an SD card adapter into in lieu of the hard drive and then used the extra space to put in a bigger battery. The parts are super easy to find on ebay and now I have a 256GB iPod that can play music for 50+ hours straight.
