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

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 didn’t have any problems running this box with opnsense. Everything worked out fine configuring as a 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.

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

Insert the USB drive in the lower USB port. The upper one would not boot for me.

Easy install and operation with OPNSense. Reasonably fast operation with hardware for the money, too slow in my tests to run squid proxy with filtering if speed/heavy usage required but I don’t really need that. It is very reasonably warm in operation but I added an external usb quiet free standing fan to move low speed air across it and case stays cool to touch. Very satisfied, and recommended. Been running a month now, absolutely no issues.

Four 1Gbe NICs, passive cooling, with respectable performance from a US-based system integrator with a good reputation and the option for CoreBoot? Whats not to like? I set mine up as an over-specd pfSense firewall to replace some rather underwhelming Asus gear. Combined with some Unifi APs and managed switching gear, it adds up to a pretty powerful home networking setup!

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 Product had potential, but out of date hardware specs.

A top-rated review says that this box can’t run VPNs faster than 100Mbps up, 100Mbps down. That’s not true; running OpenWrt, I got 700Mbit/sec iperf3 up/down using WireGuard®️ in a live test over Verizon FiOS to an quad core endpoint at packet.net. With a machine this fast, you will expose weaknesses in the other VPN endpoint, and in the network in the middle. You may also expose performance problems in your VPN implementation; OpenVPN can be quite slow.

I have installed 4 of these in my remote locations and they work flawlessly.