You should definitely replace your R210. These will work great with Gig fiber.
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Got one on the way! Hopefully get it hooked up this weekend.
This is a great little box. Pulled out the 4GB stick of RAM, the hard drive, and the wifi card.
Put in (2) 8GB sticks of RAM, an NVMe SSD, and an i340-T4.
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You can help me decide which PC to buy to use as a pfSense router:
- HP S01 (Support 10th generation Intel processors)
- HP 290 (Support 8th / 9th generation Intel processors)
I want to change the processor of the PC to something like this:
- HP S01 + Intel Core i7-10700T⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ (Cores: 8 Threads: 16)
- HP S01 + Intel Core i5-10400T / i5-10500T⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀(Cores: 6 Threads: 12)
- HP 290 + Intel Core i5-9400T / i5-9500T / i5-9600T⠀(Cores: 6 Threads: 6)
And the reason why I did not decide to buy the HP S01 is that it supports Hyper-Threading and I do not know if Hyper-Threading negatively affects performance in pfSense or any other firewall such as OPNsense or OpenWrt.
At the moment I plan to buy Intel i350-T4 and in the future I will buy a 10GbE NIC.
Comparisons:
Why do you need a 10Gb NIC for pfsense? Why do you need more cores than the stock CPU?
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Because my ISP supports more than 1GB and I also want to build or buy a NAS.
For this:
I want to do something like this:
If your ISP has > 1Gb, that’s a good reason.
I doubt that you need more CPU. I’d stick to the stock one and evaluate if you need more as you use it.
Hyperthreading won’t be an issue.
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Thank you very much!
My 290 does struggle with intense pfblocker lists and suricata. That’s with 8gb ram. I don’t know if the s01 cpu would handle it better or if an asic would just be a better option.
suricata is probably the limiting factor, not pfblocker…
I have OPNsense in a VM on a host with an i3-9100, and the OPN VM only has 2 cores. It easily handles my Gb FIOS. It can pass traffic around 5-6Gb on my local network routing between VLANs, and I haven’t really cared to optimize or figure out what line speed takes. The host is on 10Gb.
That said, the reason I’m scrolling through here is to wonder if 2x 3.5" HDDs would fit in the S01. Any thoughts? I’ve been contemplating the same thing for the 290, but it looks like the S01 might have more space for mods with its different cage.
Or is there another moderately-sized box that would fit 2x 3.5" HDDs?
I don’t have a good answer for a small prebuilt that does take 2x 3.5" drives, but I can confirm that there’s not enough physical room in the S01 for 2x 3.5" drives. A single 3.5" drive plus a single 2.5" drive, and potentially a second 2.5" drive if you swap out the optical drive and get a slimline SATA adapter, are all you can fit. That’s all the power and data connectors that are available as well.
I’m half thinking that I could remove the optical and entire front cage and park a pair of drives there, though I’d have to improvise a way to secure them.
@JDM_WAAAT I’m curious as to how you’d utilize a 9201-8e for NAS/DAS with this? Where do the hard drives go? Is there some trick for an external placement of them?
The S01 would act as the NAS with the 8e card (e indicates external ports), to which you’d connect a DAS (a chassis that houses only drives). It’d be for pairing with a disk shelf.
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What a great thread! Thank you for posting.
WalMart had inventory clearing for these and was selling last few units new cheap ($74) so I ended up purchasing 3 units and want to turn them into Proxmox virtualization nodes.
Would you please be able to help me through reviewing and may be commenting on questions below?
Questions
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the speed of the PCIE slots. Are these PCIE 1 with 7.8 Gbps max capacity? I am considering adding cheap Mellanox CX3 cards with 10Gbps speeds and wondering how much I am ‘losing’
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CPU upgrade , the BakerMS supports listing of CPUs up to 10700, has anyone tried this? Would 180W supply included handle 10700 CPU ? I am aware of 65W TDP and reports of much higher actual power usage.
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I do not need DVD drives and would much rather replace it with drive case to hold two SSDs. Any recommendations on what part numbers I should be looking for?
Thank you in advance.
Late night trolling for enterprise ssd’s, I found this slim sata ssd. It probably would work using the connector of the dvd drive in the S01 and 290 to give additional storage to the m.2 and sata.
The optical power uses a different connector, so you’d need to get an adapter to use an SSD, even one of these slim ones.
Ah, good point. Forgot about the other end being a goofy 8-pin connector
What’s the point of that over a normal 2.5" SSD?