External hard drives have been around for ages, but in today's climate of virus attacks and other data-corrupting evils, they are an important weapon to have in your armoury to protect your data. And with the huge size of hard disks coming as standard in most PCs, they are also one of the only easy ways to back up all your hard drive's contents.

Western Digital's Media Center offers an interesting slant on the humble backup drive by featuring not only huge capacities but also incorporating a USB 2.0 hub and 8-in-1 flash card reader. It's available in three capacities; 160GB, 200GB and the top-of-the-range 250GB. Unfortunately it's not something you can lug around with your laptop as it weighs a not-insubstantial 1.96kg including the power supply.

Internally the unit is based around one of Western Digital's own Caviar Special Edition hard drives. The 250GB model uses three 83GB platters (discs) to achieve its capacity and along with its 7,200rpm spin speed has an 8MB buffer (cache), as with all Western Digital Special Edition drives.

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The outside of the Media Center is attractively styled in silver and black and can be used flat or upright using the supplied cradle. The front of the unit has a single USB 2.0 port and three control buttons: automatic backup, which is used with any predefined backup schemes; backup on demand, which is used for backing up at any time; and safe shutdown. On the back panel you'll find two FireWire ports, two more USB ports and the power connector.

For the fastest data transfers it's best to use the FireWire connection, but in using this you cannot use either the card reader or USB. To get the best out of the unit you have to use both cables. When both are connected the FireWire connection is automatically assigned to the hard drive leaving the USB connection for the hub ports and the card reader.

The 8-in-1 card reader built into the Media Center accepts all the usual flash cards and media; Compact Flash I and II, Microdrive, Secure Digital, SmartMedia, MultiMedia, Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro. Although Western Digital has built a 4-port USB hub into the Media Center, only two ports are available to other devices, as the others are dedicated to the hard drive and card reader.

Western Digital supplies software with the Media Center to make backing up your data quick, easy and safe. Pressing the automatic backup button launches the wizard-based Retrospect 6.5 from Dantz which guides you through the whole backup job. It would be good to see such software supplied with standard drives too.

While Western Digital's Media Center isn't quite the complete backup package, it's close. The combination of backup storage, card reader and USB hub together with easy-to-use software make it an attractive one-stop solution.