When I built my home NAS there wasn't an off the shelf FreeNAS option and it was definitely a "research all the things, build your own system" with the huge caveat of "Did you put enough RAM in that?".
The 8-bay one is particularly good value, rivalling similar systems by QNAP, and I personally do have a QNAP and if I were to buy again today it would definitely be one of these FreeNAS boxes instead.
I think the generation 8 "HP Microserver" is a good system.
One limitation is the 16GB max ram, but given that it's for home use with (presumably) large files and a small number of simultaneous clients, it shouldn't be a problem - even if you use 4x 8 TB disks.
The key is to populate it with ECC ram which should be an absolute requirement for any ZFS system.
Just bought one of these for exactly this! Going with 4 3TB disks in raidz2 because it was the best price/TB I could find without taking some external 5TB drives out of their enclosures.
When I built my home NAS there wasn't an off the shelf FreeNAS option and it was definitely a "research all the things, build your own system" with the huge caveat of "Did you put enough RAM in that?".
The 8-bay one is particularly good value, rivalling similar systems by QNAP, and I personally do have a QNAP and if I were to buy again today it would definitely be one of these FreeNAS boxes instead.