NAS Distribution Shootout: FreeNAS vs. NAS4Free

It appears to not support ZFS.

That's basically a no-go for me by itself.

I basically did. I used FreeNAS a long time ago. Went through various other incarnations for NAS including a QNAP device. OpenMediaVault was my dream come true, as I was able to install "headless" Crashplan on it easily being just vanilla Debian-based. Can't do that on FreeNAS/BSD (easily at least). Can't do that on NAS appliances like QNAP either (though I think there is a 3rd party unsupported plugin for Synology devices now).

I've been using OMV for over a year now and it works great. ZFS would be nice, but having vanilla Debian, and the "world" of Linux software, is better for me personally. I was running a RAID 6 originally with OMV (software raid, no hardware raid card) with an external enclosure. I really didn't need that much space, so downgraded my hardware to just mirrored 3TB data drives and a 80GB 2.5" system drive in a really low-powered machine.

Thanks Volker for OMV!

You're probably not going to have a good time trying to use a USB WLAN dongle as an access point. Even if you manage to track down a) if the driver supports AP mode, and b) put together a whole hostapd configration, you're still limited by the transmit power of the little thing, which I guarantee isn't a lot. Another thing is that acting as an AP is a lot more taxing on a piece of hardware than just acting as a client; there's a chance that the USB WLAN thing will be extra flaky and maybe even overheat.

Instead... just get something that will run OpenWRT. Check out this list: http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/start. Running and configuring it at the command line is way more pleasant than you'd expect, and the (optional) web GUI is functional if inconsistent.