The advantage of Samba is that, once connected to it, the PC/Mac will recognise it as a standard drive, regardless of the filesystem of that drive (which is usually a Linux FS, for example NFS).
Samba is a linux protocol/program that creates a network drive on a 'server', this server could be your router for example, there are plenty of modern routers that support a USB-drive to act as a Samba drive.
