Ah, moved another machine to full blown FreeBSD today.
My main file server was an all-in-one effort, that ran ESX 6. It then had FreeNAS with the SAS controller passed through, and a number of other VM's running on SSD's in the same box. It has worked great for a number of years, but I've found that running anything newer than ESX 6.0 causes issues with the FreeNAS VM, and whenever I wanted to change anything related to storage, I've had to shut the machine down.
So, last week I threw £190 at a Ryzen 3 3200G and Motherboard, had a spare NVMe SSD lying around, and 32GB DDR4. Bought a case, threw it all together, and it works fine with ESX6.7 - so I've moved all "internet" related VM's to that, and put FreeNAS bare metal on my server. Love it.
The storage server is a 5 year old Xeon E3-1231v3, 32GB ECC Memory, 4 x 2TB WD NAS disks.