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

This is a great piece of hardware for running the OPNsense or pfSense firewalls. I installed the latest version of both operating systems on it without any issues. Its been running without any hiccups for several months now.

Purchased to use as home router running pfSense. Well packaged, everything needed in the box. Inserted pfSense USB installer into usb slot, booted. The vault automatically recognized the usb installer and booted from it. Had pfSense installed in 5 minutes of powering up.

I use these and vaiants for many pfsense deployments for home and commercial projects. Great hardware and well worth the price. I will continue to use these in future projects.

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.

Pros

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.

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.

Came with a loose screw inside and wouldnt post, acknowledge drives, or indicate any functionality past power being applied whatsoever. Great paperweight, awful electronic. You could do better with literally anything else.

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.

I started using Protectli Vaults in 2019 when I finally made the switch from Tomato routing to Untangle for residential routing. You can get a better price and even pick up the Vault at Protectlis offices in San Diego area. Very impressive business. I now have 5 J3160 units installed using Untangle (sorry, cant comment on Sophos or other UTM installs), and they are running with never an issue. The vaults are extremely well built, and you get much more processor/memory/SSD for your money than with UTs products (about 50% of the cost). Itd recommend at least a 120Gb mSATA and always use 8GB of RAM. Protectli is working on a Vault with SPF, so Im excited to get that when it comes out. Very pleased.