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

The Protectli Vault FW4B is an excellent firewall micro appliance/mini PC that provides robust security and performance for your network. With its Intel Quad Core processor and AES-NI encryption, this micro appliance delivers exceptional performance and security for even the most demanding applications.

These things make great little PFsense firewall boxes. You just download the operating system from www.pfsense.com, install and youre good to go with a VERY configurable firewall.

Great product for a firewall / router combo.

Does all I want it to do. openvpn lets encrypt hardware encryption. Runs very warm but it seems to be no big deal. If it bothers you slap a cheap quiet fan on top of the heat sink and call it a day. Will run cool in my experience. Your mileage may vary.

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.

This does what it does well and keeps on doing it with no issues. I was able to download documentation and installation was pretty easy.

It is hard to imagine this device pushing packets higher than 1Gbps because the web UI of PFsense is slow on this hardware despite being solid state storage. So far it works ok but for the price of over $300, I expect a hell of a lot better performance. On the positive side it is absolutely quiet and doesn’t generate much heat. I love the 4 NICs in such a small footprint. This was the best priced device I could run PFsense on which was completely solid state. For that I am thankful but it would be nice to do this for at or under $200 or with a lot better performance. I will try to upgrade RAM later and see if this aids the web UI response times.

Perfect for pfsense.

Im pretty disappointed. I upgraded to this device because my old PfSense box did not have AES-NI CPUs.

As long as you know what your trying to do it’s a good product