Time Capsule and NAS DIY with Raspberry PI

[cxxx999]

Hello. First to say sorry if this is wrong forum. I need advice for setting up my network. I have one iMac with 320gb hdd and one MacBook Pro with 250gb ssd. The hard drive on iMac by the time became little and the other data (documents, etc) I used to have it on old laptop with hard drive, now do not want it on SSD.
Part one.
Make NAS from openmediavault linux.
1. To move the iTunes library to NAS, relocate the iTunes folder from both computers to single library on NAS.
2. To move the Photos app library to NAS and launch it from there. Since Photos app is not used often, it would be ran on one computer at the time only.
3. Move other data to NAS and mount that network share at the boot.

Second part.
Create one network share to use it for time machine backups from both computers.

Idea is to use single board computer like Raspberry Pi and hard drive(s) for file sharing, to upgrade my wired network to gigabit and upgrade wifi to N or AC (currently 802.11G).

I already have few hardware, but I want to hear your advice first. I have Banana Pi (USB 2.0, SATA port, Gigabit LAN) and I have the USB 3.0 external HDD enclosure for two hard drives (RAID, JBOD, only one).

Is it better to use SATA with only one hard drive? The RAID on USB 2.0 standard? or combination of both. for example one for time machine backup and other for storage.

Thanks in advance!

 

[pastrychef]

Since the Raspberry Pi only has 100Base-T, it's a bad choice for a NAS. File transfers will be very slow. The Banana Pi has gigabit ethernet and is a much better choice.

Both the Raspberry Pi and the Banana Pi only have USB 2.0. USB 2.0 transfer speeds max out at around 35MB/s. In my opinion, this is very slow but acceptable if you don't transfer many files. If you use your USB 3.0 enclosure, you can easily plug it in to your Pi and share it over the network.

You can set up your USB 3.0 enclosure to RAID 1 if you want redundancy so that if one of the two drives die, your data is still safe. Set up RAID 0 or JBOD if you want more capacity.

Use SATA if you want better transfer speeds. It is much faster than USB 2.0.

I don't have any experience with OpenMediaVault so I can't give any advice regarding that.