1. A NAS like this comes ready to use with propriety software designed around ease of use. Inside it's case is a regular 3.5" hardrive and a very low powered computer which acts as a file server and can be administered via a built in web page. A microserver is just a regular PC geared towards being used as a server on which you would either install a NAS oriented operating system like FreeNAS or anyother operating system you wanted and then configure the shared services you wanted for it. You can in fact run a server from any computer, my frist NAS was a small form factor Lenovo system bought from ebay for less than £20, two hard drives bunged in and then NAS4FREE run from a USB thumb drive.

2. This is entirely subjective. Go on the FreeNAS forums and they will tell you that minimum you need a multicore 64 bit processor, 8gb of ECC ram and 3 hard drives and more is better. Or you could plug something like this in and it may be all you ever need. This will be as effective as a USB hard drive, except you won't have to move it round the house, anything running on your network that can access either windows, apple, ftp or dlna will see the files you set up shared. I'd start with something like this, it's not a big investment given a regular 3tb USB drive is in the region of £70. Then if you find your needs growing beyond it you can step up to something more powerful and with multi drive RAID capabilities.

3. Gigabit ethernet for the NAS to attach to. Then depending on what you want to access it from it depends. My PC connects to the same gigabit switch my NAS is on and I get 100mb/s+ speed from it. From a wireless connection that can be anything down to 2mb/s depending on how far away or how many walls etc.. but that is still enough to stream HD video from it happily, I just wouldn't want to be uploading or downloading hundreds or gigabytes over wifi, stick to a wired gigabit connection for that.

4. Something like this will be straight forward with the interface designed to be as simple as possible, it'll have a quick start wizard or guide that will get you a basic share setup very easily. Once you get into building your own though it does get quite complex. Something like FreeNAS or NAS4FREE is going to take a while to get your head around and setup correctly if you're wanting things like share permissions, auto backup and other things. Again you don't have to dive in the deep end. A straight forward entry level device like this will get you quickly setup with network shared storage with very little effort. You can move on from there if you find there are other features you would like.

5. I don't know of any solid stats for that. This will have a seagate drive inside it, I don't know if it will be a NAS specific drive or just a regular desktop drive inside. What I will say is that most regular external drives probably suffer higher failure rate through user error. Unplugging it without using the safe to remove or unmount feature, moving it while it's powered up and carting it round will do it no favours for reliability. Something like this stashed away stationary next to the router and safely powered down whenever it needs to be will be as reliable as any hard drive. That is to say you can expect a failure rate around the 5% mark which is why you want this to either be your backup of your main drive, or an additional drive backing this up if it's your primary storage.

that's pretty good for 3TB's. Personally i'd always go for Synology devices, but 3TB's for £80 quid and a decent enough NAS is not bad at all. Heated.

Think the USB2 kills it for me when WD's My Cloud devices have USB3. Fair point this is a network device (so you'll hardly use USB), but USB can be handy when backing up the disk to another disk.

Synology support is anything but "sketchy". Have you even tried them ?

The QNAP Tas-168 certainly is impressive, but there are plenty of people who would disagree that Synology devices are being "left behind".

Seems a good price for this but is it still fairly slow to transfer? The reason I am asking is because I do have an older Buffalo Linkstation 350Gb and it is painfully slow!

http://store.westerndigital.com/store/wdeu/en_GB/DisplayAccesoryProductDetailsPage/ThemeID.22586100/WD_Outlet/My_Cloud_3TB_Recertified/productID.310451100/categoryId.69923100
not much more for a WD mycloud

That's not brand new it's recertified. Yeah it's a great price and given the WD My Cloud is considered easier to use I think a lot of people would be happy with it. But I don't know how confident I'd be of a recertified hard drive with only a 60 day guarantee. The Linkstation comes with a 2 year warranty.

​yeah i see your point. warranty period is 6 months though. voted hot anyway cos its a cracking deal

Thanks to the OP for the intro to NAS drives for the uninitiated. I've been using regular external hard drives up until now, but want to make the transition to NAS drives. I'm hesitant because while I know my way around a computer, I don't know much about networking, and don't wanna buy a bit of kit I'll be unable to use. Apologies if these are daft questions but:
1) the difference between NAS and microserver - is the main difference ease of use? I gather the former is plug & play, while the latter is requires greater computing know-how?
2) Other than storage capacity, what should I look for when buying my first NAS, and what spec is considered broadly "good"? i.e. processor type, RAM etc.
3) What type of connections should a decent NAS drive have as essential?
4) Again, me being nervous about being out of my depth should I buy a NAS - are these really as simple to use as plug and play, or in reality do I need to go and read a few hefty beginner's guides in order to get started?
5) is it true that NAS drives have lower failure rates than regular external hard drives?

I appreciate that the answer to some of these questions would vary depending on exactly what I buy, and what I intend to use the kit for, but they're intended pretty broadly.

Many thanks in advance for any help.
Cheers.