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

Great product for a firewall / router combo.

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.

Started out with 1 vault, planned to have 2 vaults for managing 2 locations. The first one came with bad RAM and bad CPU.

This is the fourth system I built. This did not last as long as any of the other ones. I submitted a service ticket on their web site. Lets see what the response will be.

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

8 days uptime as of writing - no unplanned reboots and plenty powerful enough for my home network. Solid metal case of which the heatsink is part of, which is an interesting design. Runs warm to the touch (29C) but not hot. I had no trouble getting pfsense 2.4.4 running - I imported my config from the router this replaced. Very nice.

The heat is a big problem, I dont care how good of heat sink it has.

Pros

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.

Received, great condition. better than expected quality. works as advertised