90 days and $17,000 later I have my 13TB array recovered. Thank goodness for business insurance! So I have the need to build a bigger, better, smarter storage system. Presently I’m looking at 16x3TB drives and a RAID 5 running in ESXi… But it’s time to consider alternatives… NAS, SAN, something. I’ve avoided ZFS talk for years because it never applied, and FreeNAS is definitely up my alley with 14 years FreeBSD experience - but what would you do? Primary function is long-term data storage but also serving up many network services as well as development projects. I have an LSI MegaRAID 9240-8i with a SAS expander and would be maxing out the 16 RAID drives for that if I go with a RAID but I really want knowledge on personal experiences with various NAS options. One requirement: Must be iSCSI capable with ESXi 5.5 (free license). ESXi machine is super-loaded (6 core Sandy bridge Xeon and 32GB) but was design for the future growth.