 Realizing all the reviews I've done on PF Sense I said wow I've never actually reviewed one of the actual NetGate devices. If you don't know NetGate's the company that's kind of the hardware vendor that helps support the PF Sense project and they make some really nice products. Now they're a little bit more money than some of the other ones but you get what you pay for. If you want really high quality you want to put this in somewhere where you're gonna say this is gonna run for the next however many years. I want good support. I want a no compatibility with the software running on it specifically PF Sense. These are great boxes for that. This is an SG 240 and I didn't even really open it yet. This is the generic looking box that they send it in and I'll just slide it in over there and this is how it comes just kind of you know shrink-wrapped to this. So we're gonna go ahead and open it up, not big on unboxing, just rip it apart and we can take a look at the box itself and all the accessories that come with it. Not that there's really much here so it's not gonna be a real long review. So I'll get this out of the way. Box itself is all metal and like really nice. It's well like the finish on it. It doesn't feel cheap. It doesn't look cheap. Really nice quality on it. The other thing is that the heat sink inside here as you can see, take a look down inside of it, big heat sink for dissipating the heat. Now the whole thing is not a heat sink like some of the other ones I've done but this is a well-made board with a large heat sink with the atom processor. Now we're gonna take a quick look inside this box next but you will notice it does not have a port on there for VGA because they do give you a standard USB council cable and a council port on this and that's the only way you get into these is through either council or through the web interface. They come default with the latest version up. You have sense with the you know ready to be set up. They do have a reset button and a couple status lights on it but overall they're pretty straightforward and simple. Now when you're looking at these they are really quality in terms of you know because you're getting them right from NET gate so you don't have to worry about is there an update coming that has a problem will it support this because this is supported by the PF sense people there expected to be installed and have a very long life and support a long time of updates. Also not having to worry about compatibility problems these are the devices that PF sense is tested on so if the hardware varies and different builds you do and you run into some compatibility problem you could have a problem with an update and with us we like to install these at clients because we do a lot of the updates remotely we don't want to have to stop in there if there's a problem with the update or have to roll it back. So going with the genuine NET gate device gives you that kind of strong feeling like okay this is going to work like I don't have to worry about it I can click update and generally I don't really have any compatibility problems with PF sense and their updates they work really really well. I've got a custom built server that we kind of overbuilt because we do so much testing here and you know we want to push it to the limit but this is definitely adequate for a small office and being able to run you know sericada if you want intrusion detection and a couple of features VPN not a problem got a gigabit internet not a problem it can handle the routing for it. So let's take a look inside. Now once you open it up it's pretty nice I like the way the battery is very accessible not soldered on I can just slip it out and do the CMOS reset on it a really clean design not a lot of things on here but we do have which is nice a SATA on here if you needed to run something off SATA and we have a couple of the PCIees I don't they're not labeled so I don't have the exact specs on each one of them but we've got one two three of them on here. So that's that's kind of slick. The hard drive itself is a Kingston so they didn't go with one of the off brand ones which is nice. There's a couple other ones and they start with the letters KIN and they have a logo similar to Kingston but there's some generic off brands out there and when you're talking about a firewall device that's going to be running for years do you want to trust some random I save $20 device. We've looked at them because we're noticing how they look so much similar to Kingston you can find these things on Amazon. Then the memory itself is over here soldered on which is not a problem and you know there's no expandability on memory on these so I mean you get what you buy here like there's no extras you're going to add to this other than it's got the punch outs here for Wi-Fi which I'm assuming is so you can saw Wi-Fi card here. Now this system as configured is has the dual core Intel Ringly Adam C2358 1.7 gigahertz it's a dual core you've got the four gigabit ports in the front that is four gigs of DDR3 low voltage soldered on there okay I guess they do have the expansions labeled it has one M-SATA and two mini PCIe so you actually have the ability with the M-SATA you know expand hard drive if you have a need for that. Now one of the really nice things is they're very power efficient only seven watts at idle the hard drive and everything is all you know one piece soldered on no worried about loose connections I don't mind that it's all built in because they have the expandability if that's what you need but generally speaking not really necessary and these do come with a 32 gig of the onboard sets a 32 gig Kingston plenty of room for PF sets. PF sense itself does not take up a lot of space only if you're doing a lot of logging and you need that extra storage on it to create really big logs but at some point get a syslog server as PF sense completely supports exporting everything to a syslog server where you can do some better analytics with other tools so nice box though overall I'm really impressed with it it seems to work really well and we've deployed these before and they're very trouble-free so highly recommend them if you want the genuine articles opposed to some of the other ones this is a great box to go with it's a little bit more money but like I said with everything you get what you pay for in life. I hope this review was interesting and if you like the content here like and subscribe or if you have questions about it let me know I don't have this one for a long because it's getting ready tomorrow to go into a client but as we get them if I do another review on them you know we can add some more answer some more questions for it thanks