FreeNas was my introduction to BSD. Although I’ve spent time with CPM, MSDOS, Windows, OS2, HP-UX, UNIX and Linux. FreeNAS gave me a reason to run something personally useful to me.

I built my first FreeNAS server around 2010 in a used (or reduced price) HP Proliant N40L to harbor the content of my collection of video CDs of Korean dramas (and English subtitles). At that time I had about 4.2 TB of data to store. (I liked to watch to get a glimpse of Eastern Asia History as all the World History courses at my college taught Western World History subjects.)
I thoroughly read lots of forums discussing data storage and chose the N40L as the most cost effective way (although with a lot of important negatives) to store my data. My wife plays them all night long to put her to sleep.
I took the CD drive out of the N40L, put 16GB of memory, 5 2TB disk drives in the case and ran a Z1raid. Bare necessity!. Double backups of files were made on 500GB drives and stored in a manufacturer’s shipping box of 20 drives.
As time went on, I began pushing the ZFS 80% boundary, so I figured how to put together another 5 drive vdev in a disk multiplier tower using the eSATA port on my N40L (and I began to stockpile a spare power supply for the N40L and the disk tower as well as spare drives and cabling).
While I did have hardware failures I was never down so long as to miss haviing the system up for my wife’s bedtime.
The video collection grew, so I gradually migrated towards a disk setup that used drives larger than 2TB (an artificial limit to protect from “bit-rot”. I began replacing the 2TB drives when they began failing with 4TB drives (which cost the same as the 2TB drives originally). So, around 2020, I’d replaced enough original 2TB drives (10 by now) to replace the remaining old drives and grow my zpool to 40 potential TB (minus the ZFS overhead).
Tghen around 2022 I bought a 14TB drive to replicate my zpool so I could (with risk) replicate a 3-day shutdown to replicate my pool, destroy my Z1raid pool (and let my wife still see her nightly dramas via running the 14TB ZFS dataset on my Linux Workstation) rebuild the ZFS filesystem under TrueNAS as a Z2raid pool. Everything worked fine, I’m glad to say, as it would have been tedious to copy all those 500GB drives back to my server.
Just recently I decided to drop the eSATA tower and replace it with an 8-bay SAS/SATA tower running off an HBA installed in the N40L. Oh, yes, I upgraded the MB in the HP Proliant Gen 7 chassis to an N54L by buying a used MB on eBay. It’s just a plain MB swapout! I cleaned up the N40L MB for a spare in case the N54L MB has a failure. During this last Hardware upgrade I looked at replacing the whole works with a 3U or 4U used server, but didn’t because the HP Proliant Microserver and 8-bay disk storage rack are less than 13 inches deep, and I have the whole configuration set up on a closet shelf.