Best drives for sharing and editing Lightroom library remotely or onsite?

Question

Small company needs to move Lightroom folders from one iMac to a new drive, so more than 1 of us can import and edit in Lightroom 5.6. I need to move all my Indesign documents and Lightroom folders and photos off my iMac and onto something accessible to multiple iMacs and Windows PCs. Some Windows workstations will just be viewing and printing the pdf versions of the Indesign forms. And they will be accessing Word docs and Excel files in these shared folders. But my daughter and I need to open and edit all Indesign documents and Lightroom photos from home or from office. I think we would prefer to work on these files without having to first download them to our local hard drives.
4 Windows PCs and 2 iMacs in our office are on a LAN so we can access our business application software. So some of our tech support trusted advisors are suggesting Samba folders on our office server. Others say a NAS drive is a good solution or maybe cloud based storage. All these people know well the basics of sharing files on a mixed network--but none of them work in Lightroom or Indesign.
96 GB is total amount of all files, photos, and folders. Some of these are duplicate folders I'll delete and consolidate as I move them to new location. The dng photos and Photoshop files we work with are all under 5 MB. If our homes use regular Time Warner Cable and AT&T Uverse internet access, is it reasonable to expect we can work from home with same speed as when we are in the office? And does either a Samba folder on our RedHat linux box or/vs a NAS drive or/vs some cloud based storage offer any better chance of speed and ease of working from home?
Thank you for reading all of this. Any advice would be appreciated.
Tim

Answer 1

You don't need a Mac Mini server to do that. Any cheap system could do that. I'd check Freecycle or even ebay and criagslist. Look for some old Pentium 2/3/4 system someone is looking to offload. Slap in a high capacity drive or two, load a copy of Linux on there, set up SAMBA for SMB file sharing, or even a simple FTP server, and you're good to go. You can probably just run it without a monitor, off to the side somewhere, and just use SSH or VNC to monitor it.
The only problem with that, is that the electricity demands will get a bit high compared to some dedicated NAS hardware. NAS devices will have a higher up front cost, but they'll use considerably less electricity, so be cheaper in the long run.
Of course if you expect to be using the system as a HTPC as well, then I might be more able to give the nod to the Mini Server. Though the non-Server mini would work just as well, with the exception of only having the one HDD.