[luau] storage - need raid?

[TB]

I need storage for about 40 users x about 10 gigs
each, so 400 gigs or more. I'm unfortunately utterly
ignorant in this area. I've googled around & found
some very expensive raid array solutions. My budget is
around $1500. I have a mixed lab of PCs running w2k
and SGs running IRIX (plus some servers running
Redhat), kind of a shoe-string operation in the UH art
dept. Users want to log in & access their space from
any workstation.

What sort of google search should I do to get up to
speed in this area? Should I just buy a cheap PC & put
two big hard drives in it & share with NFS & samba?

NFS, samba, webdav, other?

scsi or IDE?

homemade raid?

How to evaluate reliability? There are a lot of issues
here I haven't had to deal with before.

All help appreciated.

TDB