Sorry to resurrect a dead post, but I felt the need to express my opinion in regards to "anyone with any knowledge" not liking unRAID, and how this post grossly misrepresents "knowledgeable" opinions.
I am a IT professional, working in both the commercial and education space with over 15 years experience. My career has taken me down the path of networking (mostly Cisco), virtualization (VMware), storage, load balancing and security (F5), and multi-site DR, with my storage experience including NetApp, ZFS, FreeNAS (previous user), and many other manufacturers, with literally millions of dollars of intellectual property that I have been responsible for. I have a very extensive lab setup at the house and for years I ran my home environment mixed with my lab, and took the same precautions at home as I did at work. I'm not saying this as a brag by any means, simply using it to establish a background for my comment below.
Now speaking with this experience, at the end of the day I want something I can trust, and not set myself up for a second career path maintaining my home environment. I have tried a few homespun solutions and a few "supported" solutions. At the end of the day I chose to purchase 2 unRAID licenses because I like the file level striping I can do and the replicating to another box (using disk to disk rsync scripts). I chose unRAID because I set it and I forget it. I chose unRAID because I have a simple platform that has reliable reporting and features I can show my wife how to use, and trust her to do them well in my absence (if something should ever happen to me, my customers, my wife in this instance, should always be able to get their data back). And although some of the posts are aged, the content is still applicable to most cases. And unlike an unnamed engineer from FreeNAS who seems to be the most unprofessional forum user, I have yet to read a post from someone at unRAID that has not been helpful and made a user feel as though unRAID was "not the right system for them".
And at the end of the day, if you do good work you should get paid for it. unRAID offers a good product as a very reasonable price. And at the end of the day when something breaks, I can pick up a phone like all of my other equipment, and say "please help me fix it". Try that with other free options.....