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

Great product for a firewall / router combo.

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.

i purchased this to run pf sense firewall

Installed and running pfsense firewall on this device, with no issues. As others have said, it runs warm (average of 48° c), but by adding a small fan, temperature is down to around 33° c.

Perfect little box for pfsense.

This is a very solid and sturdy box. Setup was a breeze. SSD, RAM and pfSense installed in about 30 mins. No issues whatsoever so far, and it has handled everything I have thrown at it without the CPU going above 25%.

*** Recommendation for international purchasers - if you want this unit, dont purchase the mSATA as its an unknown brand (PHISON) - rather purchase a trusted brand from a local vendor with warranty. We suspect the mSATA failed. The memory supplied has Samsung modules, these are known to be reliable. ***

This replaced a zotac zbox with a flakey RTL nic . A simple backup and restore had me up and running in a few minutes. The intel nics are immediately recognized and perform well and the serial console BIOS (115200-8-n-1) worked excellent for a vt100 serial install of pfsense. The heat sink temperature for me is right around 115F suricata, openvpn and ntopng running

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.

Had to get this after noticing that my old laptop with pfsense was not able to keep up with newly installed fiber. It was a weak link. Backed up and restored on this device - rock solid and stable.