Oh for crying out loud. I ran a cheap Kingston v300 64 gig ssd (the cheapest I could buy) in my pfsense box for nearly 4 years with squid and heaps of other things. I ran 6 gig of mixed brand ram, and a Chinese knockoff Intel nic.
Yes I backed up the config when I got it how I wanted it. Didn't fail me once, despite power outages and other rubbish due to me mucking around with dodgy Chinese picopsu knockoffs.
I restored the config from backup when I installed pfsense in a VM, all I had to do was remap the ports and it brought everything back to where I was.
Y'all are getting too precious about all of this.
Please let us all be civil and respect each others POV.
Keljian >> nobody is getting too precious about anything. just because something works for you, doesn't mean it will work for me. I too mostly run an older hardware or non brand name hardware , that I either have or can get cheaply on eBay. I have been building my PCs for years and so on.
BUT, while I have researched the setup I am trying to work out now, and have most technical stuff at hand, I want to get a feel off how it works in real world, a fell and opinion of other people who might be more technical than me, and have done this already and have a real world data to share.
everybody is providing information based on what is most important for them, and I can get all this info and pick and choose from it based on what is important for me.
as an example, we have a poster here more concerned with power consumption, I do share his/hers POV on that, even though at the moment power consumption is not on the top of my list. also the hardware I have is rated at reasonable numbers in my situations.
my main concern is more "Set-it-and-forget-it" aspect of the setup, I want to be able to do the setup, configure it and mostly just forget about it, similar to (notice I say similar to not just like) the SOHO router I already have. since I do not know how old the current HDD is and such I am willing to spend on new SSD
it gives me 2 thing, first I know it is new and when I got it, second it does save me some power as it is more economical. third it bring my setup more inline with a regular router as most components solid state just like the router suns the fans.
just as I ask opinions on hardware and basic setup I also ask opinion on the OS. and just like with hardware, I can pick and choose that aspect of the setup based on info I get here and on my own research.
even though the consensus on this blog is more favorable to pfSence I might still go with Sophos, or I might take the advice of people here and go with pfSence . at the end it is my choice, but I still like to hear other people opinions and advice to help me with making the choice.