Not to be rude or anything, but External RAIDs individual to the user is not really a solid soulution. It may work for 1-2 People working on one project at a time. But it just does not scale. What if someone needs to acces files of that project? they move the raid or plug their laptop on a differen workspace? Not really a great soulution IMO.
Like you say in the last part having a NAS with maybe a bit of room to grow sso 100TB might be the best option that way everyone can access the data and work accross projects. And more importantly it would offer work from a different place in the office or even work from home.
Yea with tape the compressed nr are very missleading. Thats a best case scenario where the files compress 2:1 with TAR+gzip which it literallly never does. Bestcase I have seen was 1.2:1 on a folder consisting of config files. Basically nothing nowdays is compressable you will interact with, except textfiles depending on format. So its best to always asume the raw space as the space you get
86W so about 20Euro/Month