What I've really lost is a no-brainer solution, as in purchasing, plugging and that's it, I've also lost a vendor lock in but I dont really miss any of these ;)

What I've really lost is a no-brainer solution, as in purchasing, plugging and that's it, I've also lost a vendor lock in but I dont really miss any of these ;) The most important thing I've gained is the reliability - in case Synology dies we're screwed until we're able to buy the same or close enough model in order to get back our data. With FreeNAS (and the bare FreeBSD based solutions people mentioned here) I can simply take out the disks and plug them into anything that has the ability to run FreeBSD/NAS to get back my data, since its just ZRaid on top of ZFS. I've also gained the flexibility of building the right NAS for my needs thanks to the wide hardware choice, FreeBSD and Linux Jails virtualization, and most things I really was afraid of, that are AFP support and Time Machine targets are there. And, the coolnes factor, you get a chance to dig around and build it on your own, gazzilion TB's of storage ;)