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

I instantly fell in love with this thing when I got it and still love it. Works beautifully with pfsense. Supporting blazing fast speeds in my home network plus VPN and content blocking for ads trackers and malware for everyone connected to the WiFi which I’m running out of a separate WAP attached to the OPT1 port. I love the start up and shut down tunes it plays out of the beeper which let me know when the network is back on, it’s not simply a power up jingle, it actually waits until pfsense has finished booting up to play it. I also love how sturdy and heavy it is. Note: this kind of firewall running pfsense is very warm constantly, it needs to be able to dissipate the heat so don’t just cram it in a tight space just because you can, it might overheat.

I was seeking some good hardware to leversage pfsense - woweeee did I find it!You will love this unit. Runs so well - FAST too. I like the interactive beeps it does during certain points of boot / shutdown (maybe silly to some of you! but it helps me! :)I am using to front end my home FIOS network. Removed the Verizon router - put this between my ONT and our ASUS Mesh.I am not a UNIX admin or Network SME, but downloading pfsense with VGA support to my USB key (wrote image with Rufus) was the most complex part of set up - seriously, I am 100% confident my 7th grader niece could do this set up. It is amazingly straight forward. All I can say is both Proteckli and Pfsense are sincerely amazing teams. This solution is a killer deal for ~$300.Also - one of my more “firewall savvy” friends had me install pfBlockerng - totally totally awesome! THANK YOU PROTECTLI AND PFSENSE FOR BEING AWESOME!

The best small business, and home firewall available. The FW4B gives you all the power you need to protect your home or small office network from outside incursions. Running PFSense the options to run system wide data caching, VoIP, VPN etc are almost endless.

I did intend for this to be a replacement router, but after receiving this product and playing around with it, I realized there are actually tons of other uses for a box like this. I bought the FW4B with 8GB RAM and 128GB HD. This is a complete PC with support for 2 monitors. I went ahead and installed IPFire on this one, and everything went perfectly. I have not experienced any heat issues with this unit and it's fast. Fans are one of the first things to start going out. Since this unit has no fans, it's not only quieter, but should last longer than other hardware with fans. I will likely be buying more of these later.

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.Install was super easy, booting to a USB key with the ISO image loaded was seamless and presented no issues. Untangle recognized all 4 NICs and numbered them correctly (eth0-eth3) with WAN and LAN as eth0 and eth1, as expected.Using the Intel i210 NICs is huge for Untangle performance, which is why I bought this specific model. My previous firewall was using RealTek NICs based on the 8168 chipset, and while I generally didn't have problems with streaming and overall performance, the NICs were a definite bottleneck during the day when I'm also constantly VPN'd in to work and I'm certain after research were capping my max throughput.After I got everything configured, my CPU and RAM usage are both way lower (CPU went from 4% avg to < 1%, RAM from 65% to 23% utilized), and more importantly my throughput has jumped to ~825Mbps in some parts of the wired network, and ~700Mbps on wireless. Huge improvement and I'm able to realize the value of my improved ISP connection.Nice little overall system.

I have bought many of these for Pfsense firewall projects in the past. These firewalls do not disappoint. These a great and drive packets home to their destinations quickly and efficiently. I recommend this over any closed source firewall or any consumer grade junk out there. Great base for a wired LAN and wLAN project!! I will continue to buy these for any future project that comes up!

I purchased the device to install PFsense on it for my home network. My expectations were low on the installation and setup however I was way off. I simply stuck the PFsense USB in and powered on the little guy and it took right off and PFsense was installed in less than 5 minutes, no issues. The GUI was super slow and unresponsive right after the install but after an hour or so it caught up and hasn't been slow since. I really like this device for what I have going on and I would recommend it. The one concern about it would be how hot it runs. it's running in the 120 degrees (F) range but other than that, I'm really impressed! I'm even thinking about getting another one to create a solid VPN tunnel.

Protectli support was excellent in helping me be successful with getting the device set up correctly. That made this purchase very worthwhile!