Small Home Network - Looking at SG-1100 or SG-3100
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Hi Everyone,
New to Netgate and pfSense and home network firewalls in general. A co-worker showed me pfSense years ago (2015-2016) and I am finally getting around to using it. I am looking to the community for input to find numbers (iPerf3 or IMIX) from my white box setup and if anyone has opinion on what would be good on my home network: SG-1100 or SG-3100? Please keep reading for an in-depth explanation of my home network.
I work in IT, have some basic to intermediate understanding of network routing and hardware, but my primary focus has been application development and support.
My first white box attempt is using an ASUS entry-level server board (2011 version with 2 on-board gigabit NICS), Quad-core Xeon processor (2011 version - no hyperthreading), 16 GB memory, and a 250 GB solid state drive. Major overkill for my home network, especially since I am primarily using pfSense out of the box for the firewall and dhcp, but really nothing else yet. I have 50 Meg internet service, but I am possibly looking at going to 400 Meg internet service. I have a pretty typical home network: several computers, several phones, several tablets, several media playback boxes, printers, etc. I turned all wireless and dhcp off on the internet modem, using pfSense to handle the firewall and dhcp, and have a different wireless router behind the pfSense appliance handling the wireless and acting as a pass-through to the pfSense dhcp (internet modem --> wan port of pfSense appliance --> lan port is going to a switch --> wireless router and few other things connected to switch). I have set up about 20 dhcp reservations so I can see what is on my network and what is trying to use my network at a glance. My whole house is wired CAT5e with everything going into a little master closet setup...the builder offered it as an option when I bought my house 13 years ago and I jumped on the option.
Everything seems to be working flawlessly, but I would like to appropriate my desktop that I am using for the pfSense back to a desktop that I can use. So I have been looking at the SG-1100 or the SG-3100 that I can put in my master closet. I definitely have room for the SG-1100, but the SG-3100 might be a little big because I also have the internet modem in this little closet setup. My concern is the advertised numbers for iPerf3 and IMIX. For the SG-1100, all those numbers are in the Mbps, whereas for the SG-3100, most of those numbers are in the Gbps. Am I correct in looking at those numbers as throughput numbers? With my current 50 Meg service, or even looking at the 400 Meg service, it seems like the SG-1100 can handle most things, except if I try to create a VPN. Am I looking at that correctly? I have been poking around in the GUI of my white box to see if I can find numbers to see what I am currently getting. The $179 price tag for the SG-1100 would be easier to swallow, but I also don't necessarily want to short myself and would be willing to pay the $399 price tag of the SG-3100.
I appreciate you reading through my post and offering any constructive information.
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See if this helps: https://www.netgate.com/blog/choosing-the-right-netgate-appliance.html. It gets into a discussion of IMIX as well as hardware differences.
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i have an SG-3100 and works quite well, best $300 investment ever.
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As long as you are not looking to do traffic inspection with snort or suricata, the sg-1100 will handle your needs perfectly. I use the sg-1100 on my 500/500 fiber with all basic networking services and pfBlockerNG. No problems, and single session throughput is around 480mbps.
I have about 30 devices on my network and 4 very active simultanious users. So the sg-1100 is perfect for your needs, wallet, size and power consumption.
