Netgate Firewall Micro Appliance with 2X Gigabit Intel LAN Ports, 2GB RAM / 32GB M.2 SSD (MinnowBoard Turbot Quad Core)

As the other review mentions, this box was originally supposed to be an official offering by Netgate, but since they couldn't completely iron out the HDMI bug they decided to release it unofficially here on Amazon. (This isn't an issue for me since the majority of people are accessing pfSense from the WebGUI anyways...) The fact that this box ends up on Amazon actually seems like a good thing to me though because of a couple things. Since it was designed by Netgate, it integrates flawlessly with pfSense, unlike some of the other devices here on Amazon - namely the Protectli devices which don't have AES NI (most anyways).- The box here incorporates AES NI which will be a requirement of pfSense 2.5 and beyond, giving it a future-proofed advantage to the Protectli boxes.- Its 2GB of RAM is plenty for basically any application other than legitimate enterprise. I run Suricata and pfBlockerNG which can make things wonky when there isn't enough RAM, but even with only 2GB available for those packages, I'm not close to full usage.- It's got Gigabit Intel NICs - which is the only way to go with pfSense.- It's low power, I don't have a Kill-o-Watt but it can't be drawing more than 2-3 watts at idle.As someone who has experimented with both a ten-year-old HP Pavilion and an over spec'd Dell R210 ii as my pfSense box, I can tell you that this is absolutely the perfect middle ground. It has more than enough CPU power and RAM to handle multiple resource intensive packages and things like OpenVPN while keeping my power bill down :). For something as important as your firewall, it's worth spending the money for a box that will provide you with more than enough resources to handle pretty much whatever you throw at it while also being designed to be compatible with the long-term future of pfSense. Go ahead and give it a shot, your network will thank you.

Item was clearly not new, security tape was cut, tape over the security tape was cut, it had an unstable dev arch of pfsense installed (that couldn't boot) and BIOS was locked out (requires a full firmware reflash). The power cord had an issue at the barrel connector and the unit was plain dysfunctional. Oh, and it would randomly reboot during the boot sequence.

This was originally announced by Netgate as the SG-2340, but they decided not to support it officially due to an issue with plugging/unplugging the HDMI while running. I installed the pfSense 2.4 nightly (2.3 stable doesn't work with UEFI) and have been very pleased with the performance. It doesn't break a sweat on my symmetric gigabit internet (in fact, it squeezes an extra 20-40mbps more from my connection than my previous EdgeRouter Lite). I'm only really doing basic routing at the moment, but the CPU and RAM use is so low right now that I'm not worried about doing more on it as I learn and add more packages.

I performed a backup of my previous device. Installed Pfsense 2.43 on this device. swapped out hardware, restored the backup and was up and running in less that 25 minutes.very happy with this device