Pfsense w/ gigabit wan

kazanka101

Hello,

I was looking to try out pfsense in my home network. I have a total of about 15-20 devices with GIGABIT service @940Mbps down and about 50Mbps up.

I was looking at the QOTOM Routers

They have various stats but I was looking at these processors…

Intel Celeron Processor J1900
Intel 4th Gen Core i3 Processor, 4010U/ 4030
Intel Core i5-4200U Processor

I was going to go with at least a 64GB SSD and 8GB RAM. I plan to run maybe a few add ons like Snort. Will this achieve the speeds I'm looking for?

bingo600

J1900 - Is going to be unsupported in pfSense 2.5 (Drop it)
i3 : To close pricewise to the i5
i5: Go..go

I'd recommend the Qotom i5 (and have 2 in prod + one spare).

Ram: Go for 8G
Disk: I have 64G in one and a 240G SSD in the other (depends on what you want to cache or log) - 64G would mostly be fine.

Snort: A misconfigured Snort could KILL any Box performance on nearly any HW - I havent gotten to Snort (Suricata for me) yet.

/Bingo

Don't get a J1900 indeed. Also, for Snort etc. you'll need a bit more RAM than usual and an i5 is a good "catch-all" CPU. Keep in mind that it's all going to depend on your configuration, so if you have very few rules, even an i3 will do. If you make a bad config, not even an i7 will work out, so just throwing hardware at things isn't the solution to all things ;-)