Protectli Vault FW4B - 4 Port, Firewall Micro Appliance/Mini PC - Intel Quad Core, AES-NI, 8GB RAM, 120GB mSATA SSD

I have bought many of these for Pfsense firewall projects in the past. These firewalls do not disappoint. These a great and drive packets home to their destinations quickly and efficiently. I recommend this over any closed source firewall or any consumer grade junk out there. Great base for a wired LAN and wLAN project!! I will continue to buy these for any future project that comes up!

So far the system has been running without any issues except that the cooling sink get hot fairly quick to the touch. The normal temperature in the house does not seem enough to cool it an ambient temp without a forcing air through the fins.. I had to add a cooling fan on top of the sink to keep it cool to the touch. Another point to make to take in consideration is the price. I would get it for under $300 if I would go directly to Protectli instead.

Throughput on this device is extremely low. 1 Gb per second ethernet is slower than my current internet speed. Product had potential, but out of date hardware specs.

My Protectli Vault FW4B has its mSata screws locktight/glued from the factory. This makes zero sense considering you have to install your own storage. The screws used are very low quality and strip immediately. Buyer be warned.

This thing is super high quality. Great heat sink on top. Would highly recommend

Im using the Protectli Vault FW4B 8GB RAM, 120GB mSATA SSD as a firewall appliance for my extensive home network. It has enough horsepower to handle several people in the household watching video, a total of 35 clients on my gigabit network, a VoIP phone system, an at-home business and inbound and outbound VPN service. I bought model with the larger RAM and SSD drive for plenty of buffering and network storage space. The PFSense community edition software is free and easy to download and write into the firewall appliance. Using a keyboard and display, the basic bring-up is easy. Once the basic firewall is active, the more advanced features of the PFSense firewall sofware can be overwhelming at first for an intermediate IT professional. I use the firewall software to VPN through my Internet provider as well as offering remote access VPN sever to my network and file share. In my setup, the firewall appliance sits between my cable modem and a managed switch and my WiFi router (which has been re-configured to be an access point). The firewall appliance serves as a router with DHCP complete with VLANs for segregating traffic. The Protectli FW4B will definitely work for a large household and a small business.

i purchased this to run pf sense firewall

i purchased this to run pf sense firewall

Maybe a little pricey but seems to work great!

Bought the 4 port without SSD and Ram to run pfsense. 100% uptime. The hardware is well built and the board itself. I recommend it to friends and whoever is looking to upgrade their firewall.