I've posted a little
information on network rendering with AE recently.
You could share one of the external drives over your network, but it might too slow to give you any real benefit once all the machines start accessing it. Without fast shared storage, it might actually be faster for you to consolidate your project and put an identical copy on local storage on each machine, then manually render a different segment on each machine and recombine them.
Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production
