Whenever I see one of these periodic postings of people using FreeNAS, and they come up on HN every few months, I'm always looking for the answer to IMO the most obvious, most basic question:
Why FreeNAS; why not vanilla FreeBSD?
I've never seen a good, detailed answer to this. Mostly the response is along the lines of: "well, of course use FreeNAS, after all you're building a NAS!"
From what I can tell, FreeNAS offers a pretty GUI and some tuning on top of FreeBSD. Anything else?
Because I've never done this before and I wanted a more manageable learning curve. I had very little *nix experience and zero bsd or zfs experience before I started this project. My next server will probably be vanilla bsd, but then again it might be freenas because it just makes the whole setup process easier.
I'd say that people recommend it because it's mostly just plug-and-play and works out of the box. You don't need to learn much about how RAID or ZFS works or understand every little detail about nix administration. If you follow the guide it's pretty hard to go wrong.
I however wanted to learn all the details when I set up my NAS, so went with Debian Jessie and BTRFS. I only use AFS and NFS, and I'm the only user, so don't need half the features FreeNAS provides. Graphs are pretty, but I can quickly get all the information I need via SSH.
Having a GUI that is easy to setup is definitely a plus. My experience is that along with setting up, we also would like to add some monitoring capabilities that would send us some alerts about the disk failures or usage threshold stats. I have been part of the team that built ElastiStor (ZFS on FreeBSD), http://www.cloudbyte.com/.
People like that out-of-the-box GUI experience. Yeah, setting up NFS/AFP/Samba is easy but there's also monitoring and snapshot management (like https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid) and possibly external backups…
From what I can tell, FreeNAS offers a pretty GUI and some tuning on top of FreeBSD. Anything else?