Yep, I've gone to a pair of vdevs too. I'm calming down now, even if I had to format an external drive to ZFS just to get it to mount (yes, yes, I know, USB is terrible and I'm going to lose all my data). I would not recommend FreeNAS for a home user.
Why not? I've been extremely happy with FreeNAS. I have two mirrored pairs of disks in mine. Besides performing NAS duties with aplomb, I also have a half dozen jails running various HTPC tasks such as hosting Plex.
My first NAS build used FreeNAS. For a simple Samba box, it's just about perfect. However, I wanted my NAS to run a few more services than the ones that were easily available and pre-built "blessed" plugins.
I had a low spec CPU in the NAS and went through hell and back to build/install/jail a few packages from source (along with their dependancies). It was a steep learning curve and wasn't terribly fun.
When it came time to add a second NAS, I chose Ubuntu and ZFS on Linux. It's been running like a champ for well over a year without a single hiccup. I don't think I've even built a single package ever. Best of both worlds, in my opinion.
