Protectli 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).

Great quality per dollar, the hardware is top notch and much cheaper than from China. 6 intel ports I5 8250U and DDR4, works great as a firewall or proxmox The one caveat is that COREBOOT is not supported yet I’m very happy supporting an American company

Running as a proxmox server. That hosts dns, bind, pihole, tailscale, …

Short story: The product did not work and customer support was very disappointing. The single star is for mechanical build quality. Longer story: I did a lot of research and chose the FW6D, the barebones i5-8250 Vault 6, at an absolutely killer price. The reviews of Protectli customer support were glowing, so job well done by me. Initial impressions were good: Hardware mechanical build quality was impressive. However, there were two problems. The first problem was an apparent memory addressing issue. Memtest failed, always getting stuck at the same bit address. I tried two HyperX SODIMMs so it was the processor board, not the memory. The product does not work. Okay, so customer support will do an exchange, like they did for other customers who left glowing reviews. Now the second problem: No, Protectli customer support was adamant that they wanted nothing to do with an exchange via customs with their U.S. based operation. They were not going there. Full stop. They recommended I return the unit to Amazon Canada as defective, for a refund. If I wanted an "exchange", I could purchase the same model again. However, at that time, Protectli was in a dispute with Amazon Canada over commercial terms so the FW6D was not presently available for sale in Canada via Amazon Canada. They warned that the price was likely to be higher when it did come on sale again. Yes, it is more expensive since coming back on sale at Amazon Canada. It is hundreds of dollars more expensive now. That is a Protectli exchange in Canada. My data point says this is what your expectation should be for customer support. I recommend that you not buy this expensive product based on an expectation of vendor customer support that includes a normal and satisfactory exchange of defective product.

Ordered when it was at a discounted price, otherwise would have probably gone with a lower end unit. Heard great things about protectli customer service which made the decision easier (purchased in canada). After receiving it and running it with pfsense installed, it would reboot daily with a specific setting enabled. I had multiple helpful back and forth emails with protectli customer support and concluded the unit appeared to be the problem (not my ram or software). They sent me a new one via expedited shipping and I returned the bad unit, all shipping covered. Second unit has been running for 30days straight since I received it, so appears the original did have an issue. Disappointed I had a faulty unit, but glad that I didn’t buy similar from a less reputable supplier. As for the performance of the unit: it is complete overkill for my current setup which is just pfsense as a home router. Trying to max out 500mbit/s internet with pfblocker and suricata I’ve only seen the cpu at 10% at the base clock of 1600mhz, I haven’t seen any need for it to turbo even. Since it has so much horsepower for a router, I’m tempted to use it for more things (VMs).

Prompt delivery, excellent product