 Tom here from Lauren systems. I want to do a follow-up video on the SG 1100 and the SG 5100 this one's pretty solid. It's passively cool all metal there This one's pretty light But one of the things I like to provide value on on this channel is not just like the review of the device What does the device look like over time installed? The other thing I wanted to talk about is the I'm gonna almost want to call it a Persistent myth and there are exceptions to it But the myth is that you need a really high-end piece of hardware to route traffic even at gigabit speeds and reality is you don't That's not really necessary I'm going to talk about both these devices because they're not overly powerful But I'll talk about what they look like real world use case installed and us using them And I'll break down some of the you know over time over the last six months the processor usage as an example But first if you'd like to learn more about me or my company head over to laurance systems.com If you'd like to hire short project there's a hires button right at the top If you want to support this channel in other ways There's affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services We talk about on this channel including a link to our patreon if you like become a patreon supporter We also have a swag store where you can get shirts and other items that are for sale and that changes from time to time What's available and what's not so go ahead and check that out frequently And finally our forums if you'd like to have a more in-depth discussion about this video suggestions for new videos Or just reach out say hi and talk tech our forums are a great place for that. All right now back to the content We're gonna start here with the sg-1100. This has been my go-to for a lot of home users It's a really an easy turnkey box for getting started with pfSense if you don't want to mess with hardware If you want to mess with hardware, of course building it is always an option But if you go, you know, I just want to dive into learning the firewall rules or just use this to protect my home This is such a great go-to box at only 179, which is the current price here in may of 2020 now the use case I am using open vpn. I'm running zavix on here for monitoring, which will show in a second Well, just a plugin on here doesn't use much resources in terms of the firewall itself But it's how I get these stats that you're going to see and I do use pf blocker So besides not using it for a whole home vpm, which is capable of doing with that is where the vpm performance Is not going to be wonderful on this but for 179 You get a low wattage low powered box that's really adequate for most of my needs And a lot of what we do at home is just watching youtube streaming services netflix etc Some zoom videos and plenty of games and I have had no issues at all running it for all of those services You get the full version of pfSense whether you're running it on this whether you build it yourself or whether you go to a higher end system So there's not really any shortcomings other than you're dealing with different processor speeds Which is why you would want faster or slower systems, but When you look at the specs on this, it's really not too bad. I mean, it's not great. Don't get me wrong That's what makes it low powered is the fact that well, there's not a lot of horsepower under the hood But for routing purposes, it's perfectly fine. My 300 meg connection home has no problem running over this This is an core a 53 processor at 1.2 gigahertz got two cores in it Has one gig of ddr4 on board ram eight gig of emcc storage And that's about it and with all of that running We're still sitting here not over utilizing it. And this is what the last six months of usage now This is zavix. I use zavix to query my pfSense boxes to aggregate statistics on there specifically This one's the your cpu utilization and it works fine Now this right here where you're seeing more cpu utilization if you go back through my channel You see a few months ago. I wanted to push it and I said, all right I'm going to load ha proxy and let's encrypt and do certificates on it. Uh, it'll handle reverse proxy and everything It's uh, the cpu usage probably went up to about 30 35 percent doing that But it still worked. It's probably not the ideal ha proxy if you want to do something iron But as far as learning it it is easy to do on this and it is completely capable without Maxing out the system able to do that now It's not going to be good for saracada that comes up in my previous reviews of people could say What if I want to run all the extra security tools? That is where you're going to have some limitations and processor and we'll get to the other one in a second on that But for uh average usage and I know my wife said she was downloading some games So let's look in the last three hours of usage. Uh, it does peak up a little bit But doesn't really seem to affect the download speed. We're still able to get the full provided by my ISP 300 megs through this box without a problem downloading steam games like she was or whatever is she was downloading I don't know. She messaged me about it. Um, but it was no problem. The box handles the fine And we do this all the time. We've got a more than one gaming computer at home And uh, also a we all of them work perfectly fine through there. Yes, and I will mention really quick though If you have a we a look up we in pf sense There is some games that require some type of a one-to-one nat rule that is a problem with the way Nintendo implemented things. It's not a pf sense problem. It's a there's a pf sense solution for it for those wondering about gaming But generally all the games that have a server that you have to get to online Works perfectly fine. I've had no issues with more than one computer gaming with it There may be some exception with some certain games But uh, if there's enough requests though leave some comments or head over my forums and ask about that Or head over to the netgate forums. There's a lot of discussion if you have some particular use case Uh, but these do support not out of the box But can be turned on with upnp to make some gaming work still recommended for home It's a great solution. It's just out of the box. It comes more secure by not having upnp turned on But you can turn it on but it's been a great performance. Like I said, and I'm really happy with it next one This guy right here Now I do and I'll bring it up just like I've been sitting here. We do install a lot of these I'm not doing a follow-up today on this one. This is the sg-3100 and it does work really well for small businesses We deploy quite a few of these a little small offices law firms dental offices, etc It does perform really well the vpm performance is pretty good on it, but not really what The vpm performance is when you get to the 5100 This has been a more popular one here in 2020 and we've actually ended up upgrading some clients to it because Their demands when we installed something the vpn demands in 2020 have gone up substantially This has been kind of a go-to solution Once again passively cooled like well all three of the devices here I mentioned and the two I'm reviewing the 1100 and this a passively cooled is always great because well One less thing to potentially cause noise or failure like a fan fans are pretty reliable nowadays But it's still the it think about it like in the past when fans would go bad or get a little dust in them being passively cooled Solves those problems now. This is what we're using in an example We're showing is what it looks like in use at our office. So let's go ahead and start with the specs of the 5100 so the 5100 firewall appliance is a intel C3558 2.2 gigahertz with a sni for cpu cores for gigs of ram eight gig emcc flash On board and then it's got the six network Interfaces on here. So plenty of uh, you know Solid use case for business has all the same pf sense features you get but what does it look like running? well Not really exciting. It's uh, probably idling around five or six percent over the last six months And you're probably saying well time you must not have sericata and all these other things running And we're going to switch real quick. Uh, this is just a screen grab from my dashboard We are running the let's encrypt. We run hga proxy. We run pf blocker with well, we do country code filtering We have a lot of filtering for things we self host to lock them down and keep secure We have sericata running. We have a block of ip address is assigned to this For all the different services we have and there's just a lot going on There's a lot of configuration a lot of rules And uh, there's not too much going on because i'm recording this on an evening on a saturday So there's not as many um, there's not much people logged in right now because well, it's a saturday We don't besides me. We're not doing a whole lot today But for day-to-day usage running all these services no problems. It just sits here and we'll go back real quick And we'll look at uh, like the last three hours here I did some testing just so I could make it get loaded up by uh, moving backups back and forth between legs of the network And I was able to peek it out with uh, just testing up to 80 percent But it wasn't enough to actually cause any problems with it at all So for the most part you can see it just goes back to idling away And when we go back over to stretching things out over six months of use just not much Now I guess we can cover real quick memory usage and if we look at that It's much the same. We're just not using the green It's kind of in reverse here. The green is the available memory And you can see over the last three months. Well, even over six months here These little dips are when things may have been restarted or services restarted that caused it to dip or when there was an update applied It takes a second and we'll show while all the services are booting It'll send a ping with something low and create a spike in the graph But you can see it's really not and actually it's it's pretty straightforward It doesn't use all the memory and this is where I've seen people go. Well, do I need 16 gigs of ram? Do I need some really high end compute power just to run pf sense? And actually you don't even with the services we're running as a business And we usually have three or four people logged in sometimes more on the vpn It just doesn't really load up this system It's kind of that myth that I think people have in their head that you it needs to have a really high end processor In order to route gigabit traffic or in order to run sericata. Now that does true These are those exceptions I said if you're running something like a extremely high end network with thousands of endpoints and On the number of state tables and sessions it has to keep track of along with Let's say you have a series of servers and data center usage comes up Occasionally because we've put these in or even like the even higher end ones and data centers Yeah, if you are trying to filter massive amounts of things and running ha proxy and load balancing etc You may need higher end hardware for the most part even an office usage with all the connections We have here even the self-hosted systems. We have here This runs perfectly fine and our connection here at the office is only a 250 meg connection And as I mentioned, we have a block of ip's and we haven't really run into any issues at all It just kind of sits there idling away doesn't get hot. It's not being stressed at all And it's one of the things I wanted to make sure was clear that from a follow-up standpoint Yes, this one despite having a little bit higher cpu usage We have no problems watching netflix and playing games and from a business usage This thing is almost overkill for what we're doing with the exception of when we do need the vpn speeds To move files in and out over the vpn. It is handy to have it the power at your fingertips It's really not that expensive of a firewall Honorable mention though, maybe we'll do another follow-up on these But we have so many of these deployed and these are also equally good with the minor exception of the VPN speeds being a little bit slower on this compared to the 5100 But that's my real world follow-up Like you can see just based on the graphs and based on the memory usage here That it doesn't really take that much to run pf sense even for a business I guess the last quick thing I can follow up on is show the memory usage for the sg-1100 and yeah It's using half the ram in it half the gig of ram is used in it to be able to do that So once again, it doesn't take a lot of memory to do all these services Even when you start using things like a jproxy and I mentioned at my a jproxy video that I do if you look It is all done on a nut st sg-1100, but uh, if you want to buy any of these pieces of hardware I've got no offer codes or links for you head over to neck eight and buy them They're great products. We use a lot of them if you just want to build it yourself You can just go to pf sense and download the iso and build it yourself But you may not need as much hardware as you think to get things done And you need very little hardware really to get started with it. All right. Thanks And thank you for making it to the end of the video If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up If you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon If you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out If you'd like to hire us head over to laurancesystems.com fill out our contact page And let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on If you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurancesystems.com Where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general Even suggestions for new videos. They're accepted right there on our forums, which are free Also, if you like to help the channel out in other ways head over to our affiliate page We have a lot of great tech offers for you. And once again, thanks for watching and see you next time