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

Prompt delivery, excellent 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).

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.

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.

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