Home Media Network

Gentlemen,
I'm new to the Mac world, and am trying to set up a home network for my wife and I. I hope you gents can help me.

My goal is to set up a single hard drive my wife and I can access through our wireless home network. I use a MacBook Pro, she has her Dell (required for work). My goal is to store all of our movies and home photos on an external hard drive/server, which her and I can access later. This prevents us from each having an external hard drive that aren't always synced up.

How can I get this done? What hardware do I need?
Do I need to plug the external into another computer, then connect that to the network? Or can I purchase a server-type hard drive and plug that in directly to the wireless network?

I'm deployed right now and am looking forward to setting up a great entertainment center for my wife and I when I get back to the States.

Thanks for your help guys, much appreciated.

You can but a NAS "Network Attached Storage" drive and use that.

Yeah, a NAS box is what you're after, you can get a single drive box pretty cheaply, or a two drive box for increased capacity at a later date.