CWWK Mini PC N100 Firewall Hardware 2 x 10GbE SFP+, 2 x i226V 2.5GbE LAN OPNsense Appliance,AES-NI, 2HD, TypeC, TF Card Slot, M.2 WiFi Slot,16GB RAM 1TB SSD

This thing is an absolute unit! Popped a 32gb RAM module in and actually am running pfsense off a TF card at the moment. Was able to set up the copper ports as well as threw a couple of sfp optic transceivers in. Everything is recognized and works flawlessly. Performance is exceptional with IPSEC and wireguard. I'm coming off annold Dell workstation that I used as a FW for the last 10 years. It was drawing between 100-300watts. This thing draws like 10-15watts at maximum. I'm running 10 vlans and also have my isps ont directly fed through it, get 1.2gbps throughput in/out. It also runs much cooler than my old solution and is whisper quiet. I'll switch to solid state HDD sometime in the future, as of now I see no need (yes I know the TF card is not the most reliable) Highly recommend!

Great little product. Excellent for full IDS (WAN) and zenarmor protection (LAN) on Opnsense. Some tuning is required to get the maximum performance I was able to so far squeeze a consistent 1.5Gbps both directions which is pretty respectable for such a small N100 processor. I've added 32GB of DDR5 5600Mhz SODIMM NEMIX ram to it and the device is super stable. I've included the Opnsense tuneables that I've modified to speed up processing without introducing much latency. If I was to do this again, I'm purhcase the CWWK Mini PC with the N350 CPU as that would provide enough CPU power for close to a full 10Gbps of scanning capability.

Was fine until this morning when it refused to reboot and now it's making a small hissing sound and won't power up

I would realistically rate this more of a 3.5, but a giving it a 4 just because I would actually recommend it for certain use cases. Namely, a light virtualization host or an edge router/firewall device. First the good: It's a fantastic build for a low power mini server/firewall/router device based off the low power Intel n100/n305 CPUs. During my testing, I measured only around 12-17W using a kill-a-watt at the wall, depending on usage. It includes built-in 10Gb SFP+ networking ports based on an Intel chipset that was readily recognized by OPNSense and ESXi. Third, CWWK provided built-in active cooling on top of the large case heat sink. Finally, it will successfully boot off of a TFT/MicroSD card, which is important as I will explain in the next section. The bad: First, some of these "bad" items are not the fault of CWWK and this particular build, but are merely limitations of the n100/n305 CPUs. Namely, this system doesn't really have the processing power or PCIe bandwidth to drive both 10Gb ports at the same time. The intel n100/n305 only has 9x gen3 pcie lanes that have to provide connectivity for ALL of the connected hardware, severely limiting design choices for manufacturers like CWWK. In this case, I was able to more or less saturate one port, but was about it; I am not sure if CWWK dedicated one or two pcie lanes to the Intel 10Gb chipset. Second, the dedicated M.2 NVMe slot is located on top of the motherboard, requiring you to fully remove the motherboard, and re-paste the CPU and Intel chipset when re-mounting. Because of this difficulty, I did not test this slot. I understand that there is limited room on the motherboard, so CWWK had to make a design choice, but I would have preferred easier/better access to this M.2 slot because.... Third, the M.2 Wifi slot could not reliably be converted into another M.2 NVMe slot. CWWK provides an adapter to allow you to plug NVMe drives into the wifi slot, however the system stopped recognizing any NVMe drive I put into the adapter, even for drives it would originally recognize. By the third boot or so, every drive would no longer show up when using that slot+adapter. This means in my case that I am functionally limited to just using the one provided sata port and to booting off of the TFT card. Fourth, and finally, there are not any really good mounting spots for mounting a 2.5" drive within the case. The spot that is provided on the back cover essentially covers the vents and blocks airflow. This may end up causing issues for the SFP+ slots, depending on how hot they get, but I have not tested that at this point. Considering the size of the case, there really aren't a lot of other places they could have provided for a 2.5" drive, but this is something to keep in mind. Final thoughts: Ultimately, I would recommend this particular model for people who need/want 10Gb connectivity, but only need one port. With the right build configuration, this is a fantastically capable machine for a light VM box or router/firewall. However, it has a LOT of caveats that have to be kept in mind.

had for a couple months now and works perfect as a opnsense box.