Me too, this was the most annoying thing about FreeNAS. It just seemed to often not start up properly and require plugging in a monitor to see what's wrong. Oft

Me too, this was the most annoying thing about FreeNAS. It just seemed to often not start up properly and require plugging in a monitor to see what's wrong. Often when I did plug in a monitor, it would boot fine, so I had no idea what the issue was. Recently I replaced it with a barebones Arch install and it works just as well for home use, and starts fast and reliably. I think FreeNAS middleware is overly complex for home use if you are at all comfortable with administering things yourself (ZFS really makes it easy). FreeNAS might make more complex things you'd do in an enterprise environment easier, but I think for anything you'd want to do at home, a basic Linux install would probably be easier. (eg. installing media server software, setting up a VPN server, even running a VM, etc.)