FreeNAS 8

I am impressed!  The installation lasted 10min 2sec.  FreeNAS 8.0.4 (FreeBSD 8.2, ZFS file system v4, ZFS storage pool v15) was installed on a 2GB flash card plugged into the PATA port. Reboot.  Reconfigured NIC for a static address.  Launched web GUI.  The GUI is kinda strange but totally usable.  Created a user.  SSHed into NAS to poke around. Left top running.  The rest was done solely through web GUI.
Imported NTFS volume, shared it through CIFS, measured network throughput by copying a 5.08GB DVD image.  NTFS is not really writable, but who cares about NTFS on NAS!
Created a UFS volume on a HD I used for OpenIndiana install - it was not recognized as ZFS and no option to import was offered.  Had to fiddle with CIFS service for the right permissions to become visible to Windows.  Measured network throughput. Pretty good!
Removed CIFS share and volume and created a simple ZFS volume forcing a 4KB sector.Again restarted CIFS to propagate the changes.  Measured network throughput.  Good!

FreeNAS 8.0.4 network (1Gbit, default frames) throughput as measured from a Windows 7 pc.  On the NAS side the following hard drive was used: WDC WD5000AAKS-00V1A0.

File System	Read (MB/s)	Write(MB/s)
NTFS	40	<1
UFS	75	35
ZFS	76	39

These are very solid results!  The biggest (and still unresolved) problem I had was in finding an SMTP server to accept reports e-mailed by NAS into my public mailbox.  So far none!
Update: resolved! Used google with application-specific password!
Yes, the versions of ZFS and even FreeBSD used in FreeNAS8 are not the latest and greatest.
There is no real time SMART status in web GUI. But smartctl works as expected which means you can hope that the GUI will catch up.
Overall it looks promising.  Good job, FreeNAS8 team!
I will check out FreeNAS 0.7.5.9496 tomorrow - look forward to FreeBSD 9.0-Release, ZFS storage pool v28, ZFS filesystem v5.
Scratch that! Instead I'll try NAS4Free 9.0.0.1.43
Improve benchmarking: use iperf.