I have tried following the suggestions at How do I access an external hard drive plugged into my router? and tried both the usage of smbfs as suggested by the accepted answer(gave problems with smbfs) and cifs (as suggested by @LEO). which resulted in an error mount error(13): Permission denied after sudo mount -a.
The hard drive in question is a mybook external hard drive that has recently been formatted to ntfs (received it this way) and is supposed to function both as a NAS and backup disk. It is attached to a DLINK dir885lr router. When connected via USB rather then network Nautilus doesn't have full access to the disk either but I can use the terminal to operate on the disk. Any solution is welcome and I'm fine with formatting the disk however it would be nice if it remains possible to use it to store backups for a windows and linux system as well as serve as a general dumping ground for files to be shared between systems (multiple partitions?)
The mount error is being caused by a rejection of the user in general, so it does not mean there is a problem with read / write rights on the disk.
The method explained in the provided link tries to access the shared drive via a guest account, thought some router might allow this by default I think most do not.
For the mentioned router please check via the webpage of the router:
Since the filesystem is translated to CIFS or SMB it will not matter which filesystem you use as long as it is accessible by the router, for this NTFS will be just fine. (In fact I can not even find if the router will be able to read EXT3 or 4, mostly this means it does not!)
Regarding your difference between Nautilus and terminal (this is actually a separated question), this appears to have been a bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1021375
and should be solved doing:
Remove
/home/[username]/.config/nautilusdirectory and restart or logout and in again.