If I get a usb hard drive....

....Can I simply plug it in to the front of the 4000 and save all files in one massive data dump? How?

yeah,, it works like charme,,,

Just buye one of those usb housings (brand doesnt matter), plug in a harddrive (also doesnt matter but trie to stay away from higher then 100 gyg Maxtors) and there it is...

Now you can drop large files from your computer to the usb drive and make back ups way more effiently then with that flaky akasys

Is there a back up function that will transfer the entire contents of the MPC drive to the USB drive?

Sorry, there's no back-up function on the MPC4k. I use ak.Sys for back-ups and for large data transfers to my computer and it works fine for me. May not be what everyone is looking for though.

Also, check this out - a friend of mine had a USB watch (that's right - watch) that stored 128 MB of stuff. He hooked it to the front of my MPC4k and it worked great - even showed up in ak.Sys!

Check the link at:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/watches/5eec/