I don't disagree. Which is why I said that I'd never recommend to any of my friends or family to roll their own server, because I know none of them are technically competent enough to keep one operating properly without tech support from me. I'll give a pass to my brother/father as the former is more proficient than I am (he should be, he is a sys admin as his day job) and the later is "good enough".
It's not just about the ease of setup and support. It's also about cost. Several people here have simply dismissed the cost of Windows license, as if it's something that a lot people have just lying around. That's simply not the case of the vast majority of home users who only purchase Windows licenses when they come bundled with a new PC.
When you add in that, the fact that you need antivirus, and some of the other things you need to effectively manage a Windows box, the TCO goes up quite a bit.
If you're going to change the topic to FreeNAS on Linux, the startup cost goes down considerably but the learning curve for a potential admin user is high enough that most of your average home users won't even be able to get past Square 1 with it.
We have to remember that a lot of us here aren't "typical users".
As for "good enough to serve files", the way you said that Stevetech makes it sounds like you are denegrating my setup.
Certainly not. Sorry if I came off that way. I do think there's merit in DIY, I just don't think it's something that the average user can support. I'm not necessarily agreeing with stevech that a DIY NAS is rudimentary and lacks features. It does, however, come with a cost. For me, there's just no way to compare a PC that runs Windows to my NAS appliance that has been running flawlessly without any errors at all for over 4 years. That kind of reliability simply doesn't exist in the Windows world.
Unless I have missed something, my server has significantly more features than your typical NAS.
Most SoC NAS don't support the number of drives or network interfaces you can support, that's true. However, of the other things you mention, my NAS can do almost all of them - iTunes/DLNA server, download/Torrent server, etc. Unlike a Windows-based NAS, it also support Time Machine backups and AFP for file transfers, which for me is an absolute necessity.
So I think saying mere file serving is rather disingenuous as I have my serving doing vastly more than any NAS can do.
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that I agree with this. I'm not trying to discount your setup at all.
So I'm covered
