Hardware appliance question

SoulChild

Hi all!

After testing pfSense for the better part of 6 months and using it as my router in virtualbox(yes I know, it's a horrible hypervisor, but it works), I've decided to buy one of the hardware appliances. Figuring it's just worth it's money.

A few questions:

I was thinking about getting the SG-2220 pfSense Security Gateway Appliance, it's just for home use anyway.

But why in this comparison list is the active connections not filled in?…

https://www.pfsense.org/products/

Also, when buying one, it suggests a ssd as a disk. Why would this be a good thing for optional storage? Will it improve boot-time or is the disk used for logs etc?

If anyone has any thoughts("don't do it!! it burned down my house"!) or something, feel free to interject :).

Cheers!

SoulChild

Also, what kind of throughput can I expect maximum? Is it suitable for future gigabit internet to the home?

I was thinking about getting the SG-2220 pfSense Security Gateway Appliance, it's just for home use anyway.

For home or not the entire use case, the WAN throughput and all installed packets are the most edge points
of an appliance such as that.

How many packets and what kind of packets or services you want to run and install?
What kind of packets you want to install?
What is your WAN throughput?

But why in this comparison list is the active connections not filled in?…

I think this is only a small device for Co and SOHO workers and nothing really fancy or great.
Firewall only usage or together with Snort should be ok, but for more I really don´t know.

Also, when buying one, it suggests a ssd as a disk. Why would this be a good thing for optional storage? Will it improve boot-time or is the disk used for logs etc?

If you are using something like Snort or Squid it should be better to go with the M.2 SSD and/or for
WiFi then the miniPCIe slot.

If anyone has any thoughts("don't do it!! it burned down my house"!) or something, feel free to interject

For firewall, Snort and WiFi usage with not to much WAN speed it should be ok.
For more I would go with the SG-2440 and for 1 GBit/s at the WAN port it should be the SG-4860.

SoulChild

Currently, my home internet access is 200megabits/s, with future upgrades in the next few years going to 700mb/s or so. But it's nice to know that with the existing bandwith, it can.

I don't plan on running snort. I just love the fact that the firewall has integrated openvpn/ikev2 functionality. Also has full ipv6 support as does my provider.

Wifi is irrelevant, I have a standalone accesspoint in the living, this box is in the basement.

For heavy services that are intensive, I usually virtualise vm's on my mediacenter with KVM. For instance, the torrent-downloader or plex-server is on my media center :).

For a firewall only usage this might be the best option then, but for 700 MBit/s I really don´t know if this
would be going fine then. Better then to go with the SG-2440 or SG-4860.