Protectli Vault FW4B - 4 Port, Firewall Micro Appliance/Mini PC - Intel Quad Core (Celeron J3160), AES-NI, Barebone - Compatible with pfSense/OPNsense etc

The barebones Protectli Vault is a fantastic piece of kit for anyone getting in to building their own firewall / router. You need to buy your own RAM and mSATA storage. Buying the barebones kit and getting the RAM and storage separately can work out cheaper than buying it includes, but you run the risk of compatibility issues. I settled on 8GB RAM and a 128GB storage drive and have had no issues.The device is delivered with the AMI bios flashed. If you buy directly from Protectli, you have the choice of AMI (similar to what would be on your normal computer) or Coreboot. AMI works with a lot more hardware but Coreboot has the advantage of being completely open-source. There's some discussion over whether Coreboot brings with it a slight performance increase but I haven't been able to prove it one way or another. I did choose to flash Coreboot to my Vault. This was an easy process of running a live USB with Ubuntu and following the instructions on the Protectli website. The process was a breeze and worked immediately.Once this was complete, I installed OPNsense. The process was as simple as following the install guide on their website. In theory, since this is an x86 platform, you could run almost any OS. Both pfSense and OPNsense work fantastic on the Vault.My Vault has been up for a few weeks now. It's running a number of VLANs with a DHCP server for each. I don't use it for IDS/IPS but plan to in the future. The system has been rock solid and I'm getting the full throughput my ISP advertises. The system idles around 2-3% CPU usage and occasionally spikes to 20% when changing settings in the web interface.Overall, the Vault (FW4B) has been excellent. You certainly don't need 128GB storage, but I'd suggest extending to 8GB RAM if you can afford it since most firewall operating systems load in to RAM when they boot, although 4GB minimum would suffice. This has been a fantastic upgrade to an old desktop running pfSense, the stability is unparalleled and price to performance is absolutely worth it. Whilst the upgradability is limited due to the form factor, the extremely low power draw of the integrated system makes it entirely worth it.I have absolutely no complaints regarding this product and thoroughly recommend it to anyone running a home lab or small to medium business.

I never write reviews so this deserves special appraisal. I am a Linux and networking engineer by trade and this is being used in a complex homelab, to say the least. I'm very impressed.TLDR: Ping is down 1.6ms, my DMZ is completely usable, the box does not get as hot as other reviewers say, and throughput is strong at near line speed. The build feels very sturdy and the casing is rock solid.I had long-running issues running pfSense as an edge firewall sandwich with a fully fledged DMZ network. The issues running it virtualised originated from either software RSC settings, spurious TCP re-transmissions/out of order packets, random ICMP messages and possibly VMQ issues too on the VM. This slowed down traffic so badly the DMZ was unusable, despite the appropriate offloading settings being present in pfSense and on the virtual switches. Ping time wasn't great either, and network jitter was huge when throughput was high.A month later and I decided my homelab can do with a physical device to get better performance. The candidates were enterprise gear on eBay like an ASA or Fortigate F60, a Netgate SG2100 or Protectli's FW4B.I ruled out the legacy enterprise gear as with firewalls, you want regular updates. Not great, unless you want to pay thousands for licensing. Netgate seemed overpriced when comparing raw hardware specs like-for-like.This was product I chose in the end. It wasn't cheap and I spent £60 on a 256GB mSATA disk and 4GB memory (cheaper than the ready-to-go version) and I was very impressed when I'd rebuilt my network to use this device.One thing needs further investigation. pfSense didn't pick up my mSATA disk when plugged into the first slot. I moved it into the other one and it worked fine. This might have been due to reseating, or maybe due to a fault. It is not important enough to investigate this as I would not run this with two disks anyways.