Newbie questions for my soon to be delivered SG-3100

[summerhilltech]

I just purchased an SG-3100 to get my feet wet with pfsense and I have a few questions.

I intend to use this only for blanketing my network with VPN and will place it before my UniFi gateway.

I noticed a post from someone talking about upgrading the drive to an M.2 card and that it would give a performance boost to the device. Would that boost in performance up the speed it's able to push my VPN service to my devices?

Secondly, am I able to assign a vlan to one of the lan ports on the device? I'm fairly sure the answer is no but I wanted to check.

Thanks!

[DaddyGo]

@summerhilltech

Hi,

On firewalls, the question of read / write speed of mass storage devices is not significant.
This is not a database server, for example...

What you read about the M2 SSD for the SG-3100 is more about the storage capacity of the motherboard eMMC (8GB, thus, this low value can be increased)
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/solutions/sg-3100/m-2-sata-installation.html

So if you want to run more applications, you need more space.

It certainly does not significantly affect the VPN transmission speed.

This is very true, because you are writing to run only a VPN client on it (OpenVPN)

@summerhilltech "and will place it before my UniFi gateway."
(of course, thereby risking the possibility of dual-NAT, which is clearly not good)

The "alpha and omega" of OpenVPN is the CPU clock, as OpenVPN handles only single-threaded.

++++edit:

Just watch @stephenw10 's reply in a similar post
he is much more familiar with Netgate hardwares

https://forum.netgate.com/topic/154765/expressvpn-speeds-to-expect-on-a-sg-3100/4

BTW: but our opinion is similar

[summerhilltech]

@DaddyGo Thanks!

[stephenw10]

Yup that.

An m.2 SATA is significantly faster than the eMMC but that really only makes any difference to packages using the storage and boot times.
VPN throughput would not change.

Steve