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

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.

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.

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.

Purchased the no memory or HD model. Except for USPS punching holes into the outer box, the inner box was intact and well packaged. The device is solid and after removing 4 screws, the bottom plate can be lifted off. Inside, well organized and easy to drop in memory and msata card. Theres a SATA plug but clearly no room. However, you could skip the bottom plate and have the sata drive outside. When ordering, the pictures show a power brick. I was expecting a brick with 3 prong plug but got a universal wall plug which doesnt fit on my UPS. @protectli - did the one i receive get mispackaged?

This server works great for Pfsense.

I set up the unit with pfSense. It seemed to work fine, but unit ran VERY HOT. Only lasted about 5 months before it died. As far as I can tell the main board died probably from overheating. Many similar Mini PCs are having the same issues. Just more Chinese garbage. REVISED: I was able to revive the unit with a new CMOS battery.

This thing is super high quality. Great heat sink on top. Would highly recommend

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.

Works great for pfsense. This is the third computer I purchased for this purpose. The first one no aes-ni... The second was doa... I was trying to get buy paying less than 300 for a router box, but in the end you gotta pay to play. This works.

Really easy to install pfSense and then configure it. Prior to this I was using the router from the ISP, after switching to a dedicated Router and Switch, bandwidth tests indicated about a 10% increase in D/L speeds. More importantly I have a much finer control over the network services performed by the router, namely DNS and DHCP.