I rebuilt my home NAS a few months ago. Former one was a huge Debian tower box with one system+temp storage disk plus 3 soft RAID1 pairs. It worked well for about 6 years, save for a partial failure due to bad disk connectors (SATA connectors are among the worst junk ever designed by a human). CPU was a low power Celeron more than enough for the task.
When building the new one I wanted to reduce to the minimum both power consumption and hardware maintenance hassles so I got on Ebay a used server 2U rack box including a good quality PSU, then a Mini ITX industrial Atom main board with 4 SATA ports.
Not being that familiar with BSD and derivatives, initially I wanted to stay with Linux, but this time I didn't want to fiddle with mdadm and other stuff so I gave Openmediavault a try; I probably did something wrong, but the experience was frustrating, from menus taking forever to appear to errors that shouldn't be there in a self contained system, so in the end I turned my attention to NAS4Free and never looked back. The only problem being the much greater RAM requirements of ZFS, which makes the maximum RAM on that board (4GB) barely enough, but in the end it works flawlessly as I keep running services to the minimum (NFS, SMB, Transmission).
Total expense was very low as everything was purchased used, save of course the 4x3GB WD RED disks. The system boots off a USB key which is plugged directly on an internal USB port, so there are no dongles attached to the case.
Yup, I'm completely sure about that as nobody else seemed to have experienced the same problems, but after trying to reflash a couple more times I eventually gave up. That doesn't mean I won't try on a different system in the future though.
