I need multi-system media storage advice please...

Question

I have a small video production company; we currently have two workstations, a Power Mac G4 dual 1.42Ghz and a Power Mac G5 dual 2.0Ghz. Our workload is increasing at a healthy rate. But with more work comes the need for larger and more flexible storage for our media. We primarily work in DV and more recently HDV.
Typically my editor and I will work on different projects back and forth. What we are forced to do is copy all our assets back and forth from system to system. We have multiple firewire drives on both systems but sneaker-netting them back and forth doesn't work because normally both projects we are working on may share the same drive. So inevitable, we are forced to copy it from one firewire to another or through the network. It's not over efficient to say the least, and at times it messes up backups and keeping things correctly up to date.
What we need is some sort of shared storage that both systems can access a RAID setup at the same time, but of course has enough bandwidth to serve the Power Macs their HDV media. An Xserve is a total overkill, and honestly beyond our budget.
Does anyone have any cost-effective suggestions? I would think, bandwidth-wise, something like a Firewire 800 or eSATA makes the most sense. I am very computer savvy, but I have to admit my knowledge of the different solutions and how they could work for out setup evades me. That’s why I've come to you guys!
Any help would be GREATLY appreciated! Thanks!
PowerMac Dual 2.0 G5-PowerMac Dual 1.42 G4-MacBook Pro C2D 2.33-Mac mini 1.42 G4   Mac OS X (10.4.7)  

Answer 1

can someone please recommend a solution that I can use to store and access all my dv projects? I'm using imovie, but soon to upgrade to fcp, and am looking at the lacie 2tb raid drives. My issue is that I do not understand Raid and how it will affect my ability to access and edit directly. I tend to like to import lots of footage (60-80gb) and then work through the editing process with all of it at my fingertips. I want a solution that will allow me to put all my video in and work with it from there, while knowing that I have the ability to recover the data should the drive malfunction. Ideally I'd store all my footage on that drive long term, but not sure if that's the best way. Somebody straighten me out on this.
It's a bit daunting. I'm not afraid of spending up to about $1500 on this, but I want to be sure that I pick the correct hardware. I do not necessarily need the ability to share over network or have multiple machines access projects simultaneously, just redundancy / stability and speed for accessing during editing sessions I guess.
thanks! BT