Turn USB RAID enclosure into backup solution; RAID or JBOD?

[dawindmg08]

Been juggling a few different backup solutions in my home, limping by on scattered USB drives and an old Time Capsule that we've outgrown. Don't want to spend the money on a full NAS like a QNAP, thought it might be cheaper to trick out an old USB3 RAID enclosure to handle Time Machine backups from 4 Macs (2 desktops, 2 laptops) so it's just one, central device.

The plan:

1. Swap out current HDDs (very old 500GB Hitachis I think) and replace with 4x 2TB or 1.5TB drives which should cover all of my machines with room to spare.
2. Plug the RAID into a Wireless Hard Drive adapter and then into my router, essentially turning it into a NAS.
3. Mount on each Mac and set it as the Time Machine destination drive.

Questions:

• Are Red or Green HDDs best for this application? I don't think I need the speed of the Reds just for Time Machine backups.
• Should I format as one big Raid or JBOD and have 4 individual disks, one per computer? Which config is best for Time Machine? (I ask because the Time Capsule didn't care how many Macs you backed up to it as long as there was room).
• If I go RAID, should I still partition it so that each computer only mounts a specific volume for backup?
• IS THIS WORTH DOING, or is it a waste of time? I'm trying to reuse my current gear as much as I can, but with the cheapest 1.5TB drives I can find I'm looking at around $224 for all the parts – which is the same price as a 6TB MyCloud drive. Which would obviously be easier but I've had a MyCloud fail before and I really don't trust those.

Thoughts?

 

[Alaska_guy]

Better to use what you have. Western digital reds or hgst drives. What you have planned will work fine. Use Raid, 5 or 6 depending how many drives you can get. People say raid 5 is bad blah blah, I work in one of the largest enterprise environments around and we use raid 5 as a standard and I've never had more than 1 drive fail at once in the 14 years I've been doing this. Granted we are using sas drives that have 10-16 instead of sata with 10-15 for Mean time between failures. Still for a home setup raid 5 is really fine.

 

[dawindmg08]

Thanks! Yeah I use RAID 5 at work for video; not as fast as RAID 0 obviously but I prefer some security over nothing.