What is your experience with FreeNAS and what hardware setup do you use?

I haven't used it in a while, because I had to cannibalize my setup. But, when I did use it, I think it was on an old Pentium II 400 MHz machine with about 256 MB RAM that required an UltraATA 133 adapter to hook my 250 GB drive to it. FreeNAS installed and worked flawlessly on it, and I never had a problem with it while it was running. One day, I'll build it again and remove my USB drives.

I used FreeNAS a few months ago with my Core2Do 2.2ghz, 2GB RAM, and several sata and IDE drives. I use my server to store files, as well as to stream media to my 360, and I have two macs that access it on a frequent basis. I found that getting the drives to mount consistently was a challenge - I actually lost almost a hundred gigabytes of data due to drives not mounting correctly. In the end, I had to reformat the drives, and return to a windows system. I also had troubles setting up shares, it was quite difficult to set them up with any consistency. I was also interested in using the media streaming function, so I could listen to music from any of my computers. Unfortunately, that doesn't work all that well. I also could not get the BitTorrent client (transmission) to start the downloading of files, even though ports were forwarded, and folders were writeable. In theory, FreeNAS sounds great. It may even work for some people. But for most people, they're better off just running Windows XP on their 'server' or some flavour of *nix. And before anyone says anything - I am fairly competent with *nix, I understand the gotchas that get most people when using it. The package came off as slapped together (there's one interface for the main system, and then seperate interfaces for the other applications that are running off it). For someone who just wanted to stream media and store files, I had a hell of a week getting it to play nice before I just threw up my hands and put XP back on it. Since then, never a hitch.