[Official] HP S01-pf1013w Owner's Thread and Review

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Yes to the NVMe drive for the OS, the HDMI dummy plug and 8GB of RAM, but the big hard drive is optional. If you want local storage then yes you can add a large spinner, but if you already have your media on a NAS there’s no need for a ton of local storage.

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In lieu of me going to a 10400 (when it arrives)

In terms of power consumption…If I were to buy a LGA1200 board, pop in the G5900 would I see similar watt usage? (PFSENSE)

Right now I’ve got the kill-a-watt on the S01-pf1013w and it’s hovering around 11 watts while in use.

I suspect a lot of that is also related to the power supply so your garden variety atx Corsair 450 watt power supply is probably not going to be nearly as efficient as what comes in these sff HP’s. Also I understand other components fall into that as well…such as NICs, hard drives, board design.

I think my current pfsense (i3-6100t) consumes around 35 watts on average. I can’t remember for sure. I know I was hoping for better at the time. I think I tried it with multiple operating systems before going to pfSense and it got similar results. My rationale there was free BSD’s power management or lack thereof but that turned out to not be the case.

Anyway that thought was on my mind but if these motherboards continue to be stupid high…I will probably just list the G5900 and get back some of my money on upgrading to a 10400.

Edit: that 10400 really woke up that little PC and yes it still idles around 7 to 11 watts.

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I would like to have 4+ HDDs there. Any idea how to fit it in that case or do I have to have it outside of the case?

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4+ 2.5’s are possible with enough tape.

4+ 3.5’s is impossible

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This seems like a good box for VMs but I have a few questions if anyone can help please.

Wondering if I could add a GPU AND nic (perhaps 10G / Dual 1GE).

Thank You and THANK YOU @JDM_WAAAT you have been very very generous with your threads and information.

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It’s unlikely that you can add both, unless you find a single slot GPU.

Also, x1 PCIe will not have enough bandwidth for 10Gb, but will manage a few 1Gb ports just fine.

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Thanks Again @JDM_WAAAT :+1:

I still have an extra 290 (for but I wanted a VM box that is fairly recent and this fits the bill perfectly. Going to pick one up, slap in a i5-10xxx with 16GB / 32GB, for VMs.

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That should be fun. Share some details with us when you get it set up!

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Great thread. Anyone using one of these with ATT Fiber 1000?

Thinking about replacing my R210 II with something smaller that generates less heat.

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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.

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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.

20210816_122927751_iOS
20210816_122927751_iOS3024×4032 2.4 MB

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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:

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:

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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:

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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!

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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.

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suricata is probably the limiting factor, not pfblocker…

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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?