FreeNAS has worked well for me for two years on a dedicated home NAS server I built with a mini-ITX motherboard. I chose DIY NAS over a NAS appliance like Synology's, because I can readily obtain a replacement for any hardware that fails into the indefinite future.
I keep a copy of the FreeNAS's storage on a second DIY NAS running NAS4free, which is the original base from which FreeNAS was forked some years ago.
One popular thing I don't do with my NAS boxes is run any non-NAS services e.g. media streaming, etc. For me it feels like an unnecessary risk to important data.
Modern virtualization stuff like VT-d means you can pass through your hard drive controllers to a FreeNAS VM and have it work just the same as if it were running natively. In fact, you can just keep a backup of your FreeNAS configuration on a flash drive install, so if your Hypervisor or VM fall apart, then you just boot to the flash drive without a hitch.
Not to mention, the jails system in FreeNAS has been in flux in the past. It never quite worked well for me, so offloading the "app" stuff to a workhorse is what I did.
I keep a copy of the FreeNAS's storage on a second DIY NAS running NAS4free, which is the original base from which FreeNAS was forked some years ago.
One popular thing I don't do with my NAS boxes is run any non-NAS services e.g. media streaming, etc. For me it feels like an unnecessary risk to important data.