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

Pulled it out of the box, plugged in a VGA monitor and USB keyboard and Rufus bootable pfSense on USB. Took about 10 minutes and it was running pfSense. Ive had it running for about 48 hours and so far it is perfect.

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.

Installation of OPNsense was a breeze, although the installer defaulted the WAN/LAN ports reversed, an easy fix and documented on the protectli website (not really needed, as it is easy to figure out). I added the RAM and disk listed below, and so far it seems fast and stable (although I have only had it a short time).

I replaced an older SFF with an Atom processor, 4GB of RAM and a HDD with this unit after upgrading my Internet connection from cable to 1 Gbps fibre. I was hitting a CPU and NIC choke-point, and only getting ~400Mbps at any point on my network.

This is an incredible little firewall appliance! While a bit cumbersome to configure with pfsense there are really good guides and documentation available. I would strongly recommend the pfsense guide by NetworkChuck on YouTube for initial configuration.

I have purchased 3 of these for myself or for friends. They are great boxes that are available in multiple configurations to fit your needs. The only way to go when looking for a pfsense box.

I have pfsense installed and been using it as my Primary Firewall/Router for the past 3 year. It has been great, I did mess up the configuration 1 time which gave me headache for half a day. Luckily i had backup of my previous configuration so it was just a matter of pfsense reinstallation and restoring the back up.

Bought to run Pfsense and discoveries that its only possible to push about 100mbit as an OpenVpn client using 256 encryption. Its perfectly fine as a router as long as youre not interested in using the router as a VPN client as well. I wish the marketing and the Amazon descr6 was more forthcoming about the expected throughput of this device and I would have just purchased a more powerful unit.

Works like a charm

Perfect for pfsense.