Vault FW6D - 6 Port, Firewall/Mini PC - Intel Quad Core i5 (8250U), AES-NI, Barebone

The product is a nice compact "appliance". I purchased for a small remote site as a small independent ESXi host. (i5 4 core/8 w/multithreading). It has no fan, so don't push to 100%. Even at 70% the case was very warm to the touch, but dissipated heat well. Besides the ESXi host, we run two VMs, a OPNSense firewall, and an app server. Would could easily double the load if necessary. We have vmnic0 and 1 as our WANs. We have the rest as our VM Network. Our first bottlenecks would not be the processor with the apps we are running, but the 16 GB RAM, and the small 130 GB SSD which we separately purchased. The hardware on the motherboard though, was not perfect on the first unit. We did have to do a return on the first unit because one of the disk drive connectors on the motherboard wasn't connected properly. ProtectLI sent out a new unit while we used the first one in it's crippled state (1 drive down), when the replacement arrived, we moved the two disks (SSD and a SATA), and the two memory chips we also purchased to the new unit. The new unit is working great. We gave 5 stars because the second unit is working flawlessly. The customer service was professional, polite, and and the return/exchange expedient.

Bought it to use in Proxmox+pfSense setup as a replacement for my old router. It's powerful enough to host multiple small virtual instances so one can pack quite a lot of functionality into this small box. Small, quiet, cool (runs warm if there is big CPU load which is expected) in a nice package. Good purchase.

I have purchased two of these units and am impressed with the performance. They are being used as my firewalls running PFSense. They perform flawlessly and are exactly what is needed.

Installed on home network as a firewall. Performance is great and runs pretty cool for me.

I purchased this unit directly from Protectli in 2021. I figured: US-based company, barebone, coreboot support etcetera. Popped in quality memory and Samsung SSD and off to the races I was. Played around with OPNsense, but the level of complexity was such that I had to shelve the project and stick with my existing router a little while longer. A year and a half later, I picked up the FW6D again, configured it with a new OPNsense release and boom, rock solid. The fun lasted roughly 2.5 months, and the unit died. I thought it was the power adapter. Purchased a new adapter. No dice. Unit is dead. Far outside any warranty window of course, but the thing never ran more than 3 months in total, on a dedicated UPS protected circuit and all other gear on the UPS is fine. I spent $766 on this hardware, RAM/SSD included. You might as well buy a no-name router from Ali Express, as that is pretty much the same thing at a fraction of the price. For those worried about security, all the router equipment comes out of China, I have yet to find anything that is open source and was manufactured in the US. It just doesn't exist. There is absolutely no reason to buy Protectli, as they simply buy Chinese stuff and slap their name on it, then mark it up considerably. I avoided the no-name Chinese stuff as I was looking for reliability, but clearly Protectli doesn't offer any of that. In the EU, there is a 2-year warranty, in the US they get away with offering only one year warranty. Way to stand behind your product. Avoid Protectli. Your money is better spent elsewhere.

First, I bought the Protectli FW6D directly from Protectli rather than Amazon because Protectli isn't far from my home, and because Protectli is a USA based company. There are a number of devices on the market like the Protectli FW6D. I chose this unit because it has good specs, including an Intel Core I5, 6 network ports, one serial port, an HDMI port, and four USB ports. Memory and storage can both be upgraded with off the shelf hardware. The hardware itself is in a solidly built metal housing with heatsink fins on the top to radiate heat away from the unit. The heatsinks are slightly warm to the touch during normal operation. The unit comes with an AMI bios, and I understand the Protectli people are working on getting coreboot bios to run on their FW6D and FW6E models. I run the AMI bios with OPNsense firewall software. I have a persistent VPN tunnel for all network traffic out to the internet. I have it configured for hardware assisted encryption, and the performance remains very good. The network ports are all configurable, so if you need to setup two connections with link aggregation (LAGG) to load-balance traffic, or to have additional LAN ports, this can all be configured (depending on your software).