Airport Extreme and 500 Gig drive

I have 27 MacBook's in a mobile lab connected to a brand new Airport Extreme. The Airport Extreme serves up a 500 Gig drive that (during my tests) I can connect to flawlessly.
My laptops all have the user, "Student." In the dock on the Student account, I have a folder that is located on the AP Extreme hard drive that I want my students to access.
During my instruction to the students, I had them all click the folder in their docks so they could see the contents of said folder. There's only 6 sub folders, so it's not like a heavy load showing previews or anything.
20 computers connected to the disk successfully (there's no password to see the contents) and 7 didn't. The 7 that didn't asked for a password to the disk when there isn't one.
So I took one of the non-working computers from a student and tried to open a file in MS Word. I clicked on the base station in the list of available servers (on the left side of the open sheet). A message popped up on the screen that said I'd reached the maximum number of clients that can access that resource. ...so I opened up the Airport Utility and counted the computers connected to the base station. 27.
I've looked high and low for documentation from Apple that states that only 20 computers can use the "Air Disk" simultaneously. All of their documents say that 50 devices can connect to the base station wirelessly. Nothing about a lesser number connecting to the hard drive.
I really want to have made a mistake somewhere in my setup. Though it seems to be idiot proof.
Can anyone confirm or deny my findings? Or can someone point out some documentation that specifically says otherwise? And if so, how do I make this work?!
My intention was to keep the storage mobile with the lab and not have to put it on my server as the wired network is already substantially loaded down with other stuff. If I have to move it to my server, then that means quite a bit of work re-setting up all the laptops. It'd also chap my hide as the Airport Extreme advertises that it can handle 50.
Help!
-Graham
Message was edited by: gracoat

I did install the disk utility. How do I go about using the disk utility to set up the Hard Drive?
AirPort: How to mount an AirPort Extreme USB hard disk volume in Mac OS X and Windows
Should I install Bonjour for Windows? If so, where can I get it?
Only if you want to access a shared USB printer connected to the AirPort. You can get it here: Bonjour for Windows 1.0.4
Not sure what the drive is formatted in.
The AirPort Extreme (802.11n) supports USB storage devices that have a block size of 512 bytes, and are formatted as Mac OS Extended (HFS-plus), FAT16, or FAT32. It will NOT work with NTFS-formatted volumes.
(ref: AirPort Extreme (802.11n): USB storage device supported formats and protocols

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