Around 2019 I started messing with FreeNAS, mostly out of curiosity about what running my own storage box actually took. Wasn’t planning to use it for anything serious at first, just wanted to see what ZFS was about and whether I could actually manage a NAS myself instead of just buying an appliance.

That curiosity ended up going further than expected. We eventually put FreeNAS into production alongside Synology at work. Synology was the licensed, official box — the one we could actually support and rely on. But early on we also ran some unlicensed Synology setups alongside it, which, looking back, wasn’t exactly the right way to do things. Not something I’d repeat now that I think about it more carefully, but it was part of how that environment came together at the time.

FreeNAS itself held up well next to Synology. Different philosophy — one’s an appliance with a polished UI and a support contract behind it, the other is more hands-on, more “you own every decision here.” Both had their place.

Now at home it’s TrueNAS running my homelab storage, the direct descendant of that same FreeNAS I first poked around back in 2019. Feels like a full circle moment — from being curious about ZFS on a spare box to it being the thing quietly holding my homelab’s data together years later.

Found myself thinking about all of this again after watching this video — good reminder of how far this journey with NAS has actually gone.