I had a similar experience with FreeNAS (now called TrueNAS): I'm sure it's great for some people, but I ended up fighting the abstraction layer way more than I

I had a similar experience with FreeNAS (now called TrueNAS): I'm sure it's great for some people, but I ended up fighting the abstraction layer way more than I benefited from it. I personally found it easier to just run Samba on plain FreeBSD/OpenZFS.