We did not evaluate other options.

I also have experience with storage solutions from Nexenta and DataCore, which I evaluated at the same time as FreeNAS. In our trial, we found that you can migrate from Nexenta to FreeNAS very easily.

I looked at a couple of other solutions at that time. This one, however, looked to me like the best one at the time. Today, maybe there might be more options. For example, there's an open-source file format that some of the Linux ones offer you as an alternative, the ext4, and that's what I was trying to do. I was trying to build a system like this. The advantage that it has is that it will take advantage of if, for example, you add a new, larger hard drive. You can get the benefit of all that storage. The big downside of it is that when, if a drive fails, it basically puts the system down until you do something about it. You're don't run it in a degraded mode as you can on FreeNAS. The other problem it has is that you don't get as much storage. For example, with five one-terabyte drives, on FreeNAS, you would get at least three terabytes, or maybe even four. Whereas you have effectively one drive less of storage with the other system. 

It was so long ago now that I cannot remember