pfSense on Synology 214+

leter5

Hi, my first post actually ever :) so...
Recently I've started my adventure with pfsense/proxmox/plex/pihole/homeassistant and what not.
At this moment I'm running proxmox on Beelink 5900HX with VMs(pfsense, plex, pihole, homeassistant, UPS server... - yes everything on one machine) and have extra NAS Synology 214+ (used also for buckup for proxmox VMs) well after 10 years my HDDs died.
I never liked the idea to run everthing on one machine so I thought to clean install pfsense on synology. It was very slow. The support is no more. For new NAS I'm planing to use my old desktop with trueNAS and ZFS.
Synology runs on Intel Atom, but I don't know if its enough for pfSense?
Synology box has 2 1gb NICs perfect for me - I would like to seperate the responsibilities and devide LANs at the switch (would be directly behind router-synology), or use usb-Ethernet dongle as the 3rd nic.
It has 2x USB 3.0 so maybe run pfsense from USB and keep those 2 bays for someting else. OR just 2x 2tb in mirror for backup

Any sugestions???

nimrod

@leter5

You should avoid using USB LAN adapters and USB storage devices for pfSense. On lower end CPU`s reading and writing to/from USB devices adds additional CPU usage. Such setups are not very reliable and can have unpredictable results and stability issues. Having only two LAN ports is not a problem if you invest in LAN switch or managed switch with VLAN support.

As for the CPU, "Atom" is very broad term. We need exact model number. Also, dot forget that amount of RAM memory can have significant impact on overall performance. Especially if you plan on using additional pfSense packages like Snort or pfBlockerNG.

stephenw10

The Synology DS214+ has an ARM CPU. The DS214 and RS214 also do. The DS214play appears to have an Atom CPU, is that what you have?
It doesn't specify which one exactly but since it's 1.6GHz it's probably a D510 which is at least 64bit. That's pretty weak though especially with 1GB RAM. pfSense will run in that but throughput won't be anything special. What's the available WAN speed there?

Steve