Cleaning the disk can help in certain cases but generally only when reusing a card that had an existing partition (especially if said partition was smaller than the actual size of the card). If it's fresh, it may not be needed, but it's quick and easy and worth trying, so there's little to lose.

@antonkristensen: picked up a used ZTE MF60 3g router today for $6 Hard to argue with that!  :) You may be able to configure it to pass the external IP to you. Your ISP may be using Carrier Grade NAT so that might be your external IP. It's relatively common in mobile broadband. Steve

I am working on this exact thing also.  Using a Raspberry PI and talking to my pfSense router via SNMP.  I have the basics and components all ready to go and am currently writing the main scripts.  Updates to follow.

If you're not filtering any of the traffic between vLANs, why have pfSense aware of them at all?  There is no way that a pfSense box will have anywhere near the throughput of a L3 switch if all you need is simple routing between vLANs.  In my core network at work I use a pair of Cisco Nexus 5548UP switches w/ L3 Modules and 16-port expansion cards for servers and aggregation & Nexus 2248TP Fabric Extenders for 1Gbe data center devices. What is it that you are seeing as a performance bottleneck?

You know why I like SLC?  Because I've never had even 1 single failure with those.  Not 1. Doesn't mean the MLC in this unit isn't also great.

the people at the freenas forum went all anti Kingston after they messed around with their part numbers. most recommend crucial now. what i used on my freenas build

No, it doesn't need to be.

going for intel, hope it works thanks for your input :)

@eliteassassin07: @Wolf666: I have: http://www.mini-box.com/M350-universal-mini-itx-enclosure That is the case that I wanted to use, however you can not add a PCI Express card to that box… Which means no Intel Nic... You could of course go with the Mini Box M300 however that requires a riser card and a Pico power supply.. Mini Box M300 = $59.95 PCI Express Riser Card = $29.00 Pico Power Supply = $35.00 Total = $123.95!!! That is way to pricey for what you are getting (and for what I am using it for) Pair that case with a motherboard with dual Intel NICs on board.  This is the one I used. http://www.mini-box.com/Intel-D2500CCE-Mini-ITX-Motherboard

@kroberts: That minnowboard max looks interesting. I like the RAM sink glued on top of the CPU.  Really lets on how low the power consumption is.

No.  pfSense works on x86 & x86-64 systems.

Well the seller states: PfSense 2.2 (Final) Release Embedded Install w/ VGA output So that's almost certainly a Nano install (since the embedded kernel full install does not have VGA output) but it may have been modified by the seller. Just check yourself when you get it. Steve

Don't blame Watchguard it's Lanner's board.  :) Yes it's PCIe 8x. You should be able to use it with a gender changer or some type of riser but I've yet to find one. Which is odd because this arrangement seems common on embedded boards. Steve

Nice 1st post.  :) So it simply needs the virtual CD drive to be ejected to switch modes? Steve

@Cino: Thank you for sharing the wattage info.. I'm pretty much sold on this board, just need to get funds.. Keep an eye out on Newegg for open box.  I have now ordered three A1SAi-C2758F open box from newegg.  I know another forum user just picked up another one open box.  They usually go for around 260-280 open box. I haven't had any problems with my first two, which are currently acting as ESXi hosts.  I haven't tried the third yet, as I need to transplant that host out of my M350 case and into it's respective Supermicro 1U chassis (it's being delivered Wednesday.)  I'll post back with the results of the third (which is going to be my dedicated pfSense host.) Edit:  Clarified some poor grammar.

Yeah - I've been saying "Thank God I'm not using XEN" for a few days now. EXSi is working fine for me so far.  No issues.