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

simply love it. I may get another for media server.

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.

This is my third unit that has now failed. There is an issue with some function with the motherboard that fails prematurely. The latest has a QC mark indicating a manufacture date of late 2018. I have had dozens of computers and none have had this high a failure rate in such a short period of time. If you need fanless SFF then these work well when they run but be prepared for it to die within a few years.

Why did i not find this sooner.....

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.

My Protectli Vault FW4B has its mSata screws locktight/glued from the factory. This makes zero sense considering you have to install your own storage. The screws used are very low quality and strip immediately. Buyer be warned.

I have been running for a month or so with Sophos Home UTM 9.7 at home. Works great no issues or complaints.

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

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 little box for pfsense.