sorry to be a pain...but

There's no shortage of NAS units available either as a simple fixed-drive – such as the WD MyBook Live I have (other brands are available) – or preconfigured with drives installed for you by the vendor, tested and set-up.

Thankyou Andrew,now just find a shop to buy it from

Well, Western Digital has its own online store, although you may find the products for less elsewhere. However, based on my recent experience, if you're going to travel any distance to buy a NAS, do make sure a) the shop has it in stock and b) the product hasn't been 'pre-loved'!

Andrew,i have just read a few reviews and software issues relating to initual set-up keep cropping up,do you know if these are still valid?

I realy must start looking at the blogs page ...by the way,couldn't the team,for a small cost of course offer some of those magic cards out?!!!...maybe...just a thought

Some NAS drives need a bit of rummaging in their set-up menus to get them to behave, but neither the WD nor the Iomega I bought last time round seemed to have any problems – you just have to make sure the UPnP/DLNA/Media Server (or whatever the NAS manufacturer decides to call it) is switched on, and you should be in business.

As I explained in the D-Link blog, you can make things complicated for yourself, but in general I've had no real problems: you just plug the NAS and your receiver into the router, and it'll sort things out.

If you have a lot of products and keep connecting them to, and disconnecting them from, the network, it's probably safest to assign static IP addresses to the NAS and receiver, so they can always find each other, but beyond that it should be plain sailing.

After all, as I said in the DLink blog, if I can do it anyone can, and at the moment at home we have four NAS devices (DLink, Iomega, WD and a Naim UnitiServe) feeding seven streaming clients Naim NDX, NaimUniti, two Mac laptops and an iMac, Cambridge Audio C651BD Blu-ray player and Sony SMP-N100 'netbox'), all controlled by, at various times, one of two iPads, an iPod Touch and an iPhone or two. Quite complex enough for me, thanks!

Oh, and one final idea: for stability's sake, I wouldn't use the router built-into a home broadband router/modem as a means of connecting your new NAS to your receiver. My advice would be to invest a few quid in a separate Ethernet switch: connect NAS and receiver to this, and run a connection from the switch to the modem/router for internet radio on the receiver and the like. This keeps the NAS and receiver away from other traffic on the network - handy when there are as many wired and wireless devices on the go as we have, but also a sensible precaution for not much money (£30 or so for a switch plus one extra Ethernet cable) even in simpler systems.

Thanks for your advice,and i'm sure my sig will change very soon.

Interesting blog, made me angry just reading it! I don't see why you don't name and shame with that illegal behaviour, definitely fraud being committed there by someone selling used goods as new. 

Your 'Act' titles remind me of Frasier