Looking at my SMART data it is going to be a while before I see enough writes to get off 0%. 9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032  100  100  001    Old_age  Always      -      1387 ... 202 Perc_Rated_Life_Used    0x0018  100  100  001    Old_age  Offline      -      0 I am going to be Googling a bit on these SMART entries, they are the only interesting ones so far: 173 Wear_Leveling_Count    0x0033  100  100  010    Pre-fail  Always      -      1 174 Unexpect_Power_Loss_Ct  0x0032  100  100  001    Old_age  Always      -      13 181 Non4k_Aligned_Access    0x0022  100  100  001    Old_age  Always      -      118 116 1

That system is massively overspecced for 10Mbps throughput. It could probably handle >1Gbps with Snort and Squid. Steve

Yup… Intel Pro work well. You are all set.

Go for a i3 compatible mini-ITX mobo and 6GB RAM and you should be all set. You could do it in 4GB as well but Snort package sometimes has issues and needs additional RAM. Haven't seen it behave that bad in sometime but you never know.

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182243 Get this motherboard and the case below. http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811152108 You will have to get the ram and anything else you want. It might cost more but it will be a better than the pre-configured barebone system.

#6 Thanks for clearing it up, I will use the E3-1245V2 for the project an see how much power is left when it is being hit by that amount of traffic  :)

what kind of media are you using? CD? USB Drive?

@Explorer2001: i think i can install it on win7 ? (32bit or 64bit?) or u advice win xp pro ? pfSense is a complete operating system (it's built on FreeBSD). You do not install it on top of Windows. If you are buying a desktop machine to use you want one that doesn't come with any OS. The most important figure when sizing a box for pfSense is the expected throughput. You mentioned in another thread that it will be 6X 100Mbps WANs presumably load balanced. Try to get Intel NICs if you can as they are best supported. Steve

ya i just tried that an it sees them now im tring to install the os on the HDD an i cant get passed 36% something with the cpdup -vvv -i -o /user /mnt/usr does anyone know why it does this  on the amd64 ver.  ????

hi stephenw10, a short feedback. It is running very well but i dont know the root cause. 42Mbit AES-256bit-CBC@60% cpu usage. I have recognized that using SSH or the webinterface is dropping the download speed extremly for some seconds. If i close all these applications the speed is stable. thx for support

There's some instructions here: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,46329.msg247933.html#msg247933 They are for i386 so you'll have to substitute amd64. Steve

@stephenw10: So you will have 6 WAN interfaces (100Mbps cable connections) connected on 6 VLANs via a single cable. And 3 LAN interfaces. Are those also to be connected via VLAN or three separate NICs? What you are describing seems feasible. Steve yes steve.. if i will try to solve this problem with NICs, i need to put 6 nic + 2nic on a motherboard.. it seems impossible.. that is why i will gather 6 wan on a L2 managed switch and create 6vlan and will tagged them.. my pfsense knowledge is on the book right now, it means i never did it before.. that is why i am asking your opinions.. please correct me if i am doing something wrong or missing something. 3 Lan interfaces also will connect to a second L2 managed switch and build vlan and tag. then connect with a single cable to pc. pfsense pc will have only 2 ethernet card..  is it possible right ? thanks again..

@robi: As 1U rackmount case we use Travla C159 with external DC PSU see: http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=63#c159-80w Pretty expensive but premium quality. Really expensive, but I got lucky and got this http://www.ebay.com/itm/Casetronic-C159-Rackmount-Mini-ITX-Case-1-/121069902132

For 100mbps, one wan and one LAN is more than enough. Of course if you are going to do vlans or lots of internal routing, have a nic in lass setup might not be a bad idea. You can always add it later also, or if it needs to be the budget now, get it. You can always use it when you need it

If you dig into the specs you'll see that even some of the cheaper SSD drives are rated for multiple full disk writes per day for several years. If you think you might approach that amount of writing you could step up to the next larger drive size for a big boost in allowable writes. Actually I kind of favor the 128 size over the 64 due to the faster speeds you see with more internal flash data channels anyway. The spinning drive might last longer or it might die at any time, same for the SSD since the failure numbers are averages but I'd go SSD for the noise, heat and power savings in any case.

Intel Dual- Core D525 –- its still an Atom processor :)