FreeNAS is distributed and supported as an all-in-one appliance primarily. The boot process is generally expected to be run off of USB flash drives because, sim

FreeNAS is distributed and supported as an all-in-one appliance primarily. The boot process is generally expected to be run off of USB flash drives because, similar to how VMware ESXi works, is typically expected to be run on systems where installation to a local disk is not only a waste of space but potentially dangerous (mounting your USB device with write wears it out faster than if it was read-only with RAMdisks mounted). I generally build my file servers so that each disk is part of the data pool and the boot device is a USB flash drive that either shipped with the computer by the OEM (HP, Dell, Cisco, etc.) or one I imaged myself and put onto the available USB port on the motherboard (not the rear or forward ports typically in server hardware for security reasons at least). It comes with a lot of features in the web interface that any decent FreeBSD admin could install and manage, and many out of the box settings are optimized for situations that are common for SOHO file servers. This buys a bit of time and makes it easier for others to maintain that may not be FreeBSD gurus necessarily. There are a few tunings (sysctl stuff) and customized options specific to ZFS servers that FreeNAS offers as well. For example, most ZFS users don't have an encrypted scratch partition created on each drive in their ZFS vdevs, but FreeNAS creates them for you by default as a strong recommendation unless you explicitly turn it off with a slightly obscure setting in the web GUI.