My NAS History
My first NAS install happened about seven years ago, and used FreeNAS with NFS partitions. I upgraded to a newer version of FreeNAS, and found out after the fact that the new version no longer supported NFS partitions, and it ticked me off enough to install Win7 on the box because I could no longer download the old version of FreeNAS.
The current state of Windows has caused me to reconsider Linux as a viable alternative to the crap that comes out of Redmond, and I've been using Linux for the last two weeks with no apparent ill effects, so... I'm currently on a Linux death march to rid myself of Windows to the extent possible. I still do dev for Windows and use DVDFab to rip DVDs, which is actually the driving force between having a NAS, and because of this, I'll still have a Win7 VM, but my day-to-day stuff will be done exclusively in Linux. In any case, the desire to go "all Linux all the time" caused me to re-evaluate my NAS setup.
FWIW, I'm in the process of migrating nine boxes from Win7 to Linux, including two Ubuntu desktops, two Lubuntu desktops, an OMV desktop, three Ubuntu laptops, a NUC running Kodi, and finally, two Raspberry Pi 3B+ running Raspian/Pi-hole. I also have another desktop that is currently running MediaPortal (the Kodi box will replace this if everything goes okay with OMV/Kodi).
NAS Hardware
I'm using a 18-inch U2-UFO cube case from Mountain Mods (https://www.mountainmods.com/product_info.php?products_id=79) that has room for up to 18 drives. The motherboard is a Gigabyte with an Intel 2020e CPU and 16GB of RAM, into which I added a SATA card and a USB 3.0 card. It will be booting from a 60GB SSD, and currently contains 3 2TB drives (soon to include a 3 or 4TB drive).
I don't yet know if it's possible (I haven't googled it yet), but I'm intending to store the logs on a re-purposed 250GB analog laptop drive in an attempt to avoid loading an otherwise unnecessary add-on and to prolong the life of the SSD.
The box is currently booting Lubuntu, and I'm in the process of converting the existing drives from NTFS to EXT4 (copying the files to an eternal 2tb drive, re-partitioning the NAS drive, and copying the files back to it - I have to do this three times, and it takes about three hours to copy in one direction). Once that's done, I'll install OMV, and tie my Kodi box to it to serve movies/music.