Hi. I'm in charge of setting up a edit/post suite for a small production company that I work for. We typically take our footage to a post facility to be transferred to hard drives, so our workflow is fairly simple. The problem that I need help with is how to organize our hard drives. At the moment we typically have a separate hard drive for each project. I think we have about 17 now. Our executive producer would like the hard drives to be searchable, hopefully from multiple computers in the suite. How do I go about about making this possible?

Should I put the hard drives on shelves and then daisy chain them together? Is this possible or even safe for the data?

Should I invest in a server/ RAID array? Is this solution very complicated to set up?

Or is there some other solution that would be better?

If anyone has experience working/ setting up a high(er) end post suite, I'd be interested to know how you store all your data. Thank you!

I would like to know this too actually...

It sounds to me based on the needs described that you'd be looking for a server configuration. And in a Mac environment, that probably means an Xserve RAID:
http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/

With the amount of storage you're describing all accessible in one machine/location, with enough bandwidth for several people to access media in real-time from it, this would be your best option. It's scalable as well, so you don't necessarily need to over-purchase. Although you didn't mention if you're doing SD or HD projects, this would give you the most flexibility in the future also for the kind of bandwidth needed on larger HD projects.

Hope this is helpful. Talking about external mass network storage for video is really opening Pandora's Box.