The Verdict
The common consensus among users is that it may take up to a week – certainly several days – for you to properly tweak the NAS configuration, depending on your requirements. Our chosen distributions offer all the features and flexibility of a commercial NAS, but without the additional cost of proprietary software.
EasyNAS, despite its easy-to-use interface leaves a lot to be desired. When you click NFS in the sidebar, you can enable/ disable the service in the main panel and create new NFS shares. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to edit any NFS settings, despite there being a Settings tab. Clicking it reveals an empty box and there’s no way to open a settings file, or write one of your own. The search bar is also unreliable and doesn’t reveal results even when you type the exact name. The distribution also doesn’t provide as many options when creating volumes and even lacks encryption or support for plugins. It’s for these reasons that EasyNAS, despite its simplicity, comes in last.
Despite offering far more configurable elements than the other distributions out of the box, the NAS4Free interface is straightforward and logical, and doesn’t appear cluttered. While the distribution just works and gets everything right, its comparatively limited documentation robbed it of a podium finish.
Unfortunately, some aspects of OpenMediaVault interface, such as defining user quotas, are slightly counter-intuitive. Instead of being able to define quotas from the user management screen, this is done from disk management, separately for all available disks. This is more of a surprise than an inconvenience, though. Unlike the other distributions, it also has a default lock-out feature, which is useful if you ever step away from while signed-in to the web interface. But its over reliance on plugins to offer essential features is why the distribution, despite being otherwise brilliant, comes in at third spot.
FreeNAS’s use of FreeBSD’s Jails mechanism to run plugins inside isolated silos ensures that even if the plugins are compromised they can’t affect the NAS. However, if you have to choose a NAS for machine with limited RAM, then you’d be better off with Rockstor.