I recently bought a NAS device called “LANDISK” on ebay (search for SAMBA-FTP-USB-2-0-LAN on google).
This device includes a samba server which enables sharing of files on the network. The shared files can be accessed very simple via \\netdisk\\yourshare\. This works under Windows and under Linux in konqueror with smb://netdisk/yourshare.
It would however be nicer to have it mounted into the linux...