The bottleneck on most home labs is the lan. A new spindled hard drive running ext3/4 or ntfs can easily saturate a 1 gig nic. That makes the complications of running an NAS on raid or zfs not worth the time and effort-- unless you like playing with file systems or flooding your lan.

I built my own nas a few years back with a multi disk zfs pool and ubuntu running mellanox 10g nics. Fast as it was, the complexity of it all, especially zfs having its own way of doing everything, made it a time hog. Just wasn't worth it.

Now I run my nas in a Debian Mint VM with consumer grade 2.5G nic adapters. Simplicity and ease of recovery are my priorities.