The hardware is a desktop with a i5-4570 CPU @ 3.20GHz CPU, 8Gb of memory and a pair of Hitachi 2Tb Sata hdd's as a mirrored ZFS file system.

It is not fast and adequate most of the time. It was my daily desktop some years ago, although with a few changes since then.

FreeBSD is my preferred server platform. The OS could be considered "old fashioned", but looking at what systemd has done to Linux, I prefer to look elsewhere.

Having been confronted with many Operating Systems over the years, I find FreeBSD to be a comfortable fit.
If you are wondering what is my OS list, it includes VMS, AIX, HPUX, Solaris, Minix, Linux, CP/M, other unix flavours, Dos and all Windows versions including MIPS and SPARC.