Jim G wrote:
Is there an advantage to these over say a Synology NAS for music? They appear to be roughly in the same price range.
There are two parts to a NAS:
RAID system and OS which supports network presentation of file system. FreeNAS is an customized OS which supports former. RAID, the core of NAS is best done by a “mature” RAID controller. Companies like Synology and Qnap develop their own hardware and OS, so they operate trouble free mostly. To build a NAS server at home with FreeNAS , you need to take care of hardware. A good RAID controller from companies like LSI, Dell, HP costs about $300-$600. Typically the PCs include $15 RAID controllers.
Unless you are technically saavy like Roscoe,I would recommend against building a FreeNAS system. You don’t want to loose all your song collection because the the Silliness of the cheap hardware that comes with consumer PCs. A server class computer costs about 10 times more than a similarly configured PC.