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CJ,
In it's simplist form yes it's just a pc but it's one designed and dedicated to do the job.
1. much lower power consumption as the processor is low power and your only running scaled down versions of an OS etc.
2. RAID you can get this in a pc both software + hardware but it's quite flawless out of the box and easy to setup, flexible
3. Its a stripped down linux kernel, less updating rebooting much much more reliable
4. footprint , the box is very small for the amount of hard drives used
5. fast, outside of a proper hardware raid card which are expensive
6. cost, it's not that much more expensive if not cheaper then a pc to run your storage
7. easier / less management then a regular pc / setup, much easier for a average joe
8. You can use it as a vmware / iscis etc etc
9 Huge amount of software can be installed with a simple click to do all kinds of tasks with all the advantages as above
I could go on and on in short your paying a fair bit of money for hardware and quality software to run everything, that could be had cheaper and even software that could do it for free for you (freenas) etc but your paying for a smooth well tested small, low power computer with a huge amount of functions and most of all is fairly reliable (very reliable without going to enterprise equipment) without paying a fortune for a high quality hardware raid card or two and skills required to setup and manage these setups.
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