Whenever I see one of these periodic postings of people using FreeNAS, and they come up on HN every few months, I'm always looking for the answer to IMO the most obvious, most basic question:

   Why FreeNAS; why not vanilla FreeBSD?

I've never seen a good, detailed answer to this. Mostly the response is along the lines of: "well, of course use FreeNAS, after all you're building a NAS!"

From what I can tell, FreeNAS offers a pretty GUI and some tuning on top of FreeBSD. Anything else?

People like that out-of-the-box GUI experience. Yeah, setting up NFS/AFP/Samba is easy but there's also monitoring and snapshot management (like https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid) and possibly external backups…