Verbatim MediaStation Pro review

The Verbatim MediaStation Pro is an external hard disk with a difference.

Not only is its 500GB capacity enough to store hundreds of hours of music and video, it'll also hook up to your TV and play your media files without any need for a PC. It'll also play shared files directly from any PC on your home wireless network.

It looks great on paper. The MediaStation accepts a huge range of file formats, right up to 1080p MPEG4 HD video files. There's a remote, so you don't have to fiddle around with the box itself. It supports both wired and wireless networking, and round the back it has a huge range of connectors to hook up to more or less any sort of TV via composite, S-video, component or HDMI. You can even attach a secondary USB hard disk and use the MediaStation Pro to play the files directly from it. It'll also connect to the Shoutcast Internet radio service, so you can use the MediaStation Pro to discover new music as well as listening to the tunes you already own.

Sadly, although the MediaStation Pro has no end of features, actually using them wasn't as rewarding as we'd hoped. The menu system was sluggish and illogical, and when we were browsing other computers on our network it could take ages for the list of files to appear on the TV screen.

That goes for the remote control, too: it has far too many buttons, and too often they don't do what you'd expect. We spent a lot of time stabbing around trying to guess how to make the box do what we wanted.

If the MediaStation Pro was basically an external hard disk with the media features as a bonus, we could maybe forgive its ropey interface, but at £210 it's three times the price of a standard 500GB drive. Sure, it does a lot, and if that's what you need its sheer versatility means it has little competition. But think hard before you splash out, as it really is a pain to use.