HDD an absolute necessity ?

[M3troidman]

hello and thank you for taking your time to read my forum post!

i am currently in the process of building a firewall out of a HP proliant ML310 G4 tower

iwe been looking at benchmarks where theres been alot of mention about using SD cards for the Operating system instead of HDD's, i am at a budget where i dont get to use SSD's for a simple firewall

i am looking at a troughput of 20-150mb/s however im not sure if this is achievable with the hardware schematic i have planned

i am curious if it is possible to setup OPNsense to run from a usb stick so that if needed any logs made would be offloaded to a server in the actual network, i am asking if this is possible as i have a limited amount of harddrives and truly limited funds on hardware (hence the old machine in the first place)

this whole setup in its context is hypothetical as it will take me time until i get access to all the hardware where i will be setting this up, hence i have 0 first hand knowledge of OPNsense it simply has come highly recommended therefore i am curious if it is possible to run it trough usb without much hinderance and HDD's

and if usb is not a good enough alternative are there any cheap alternatives would an SD card trough a reader be better if so is there any documentation on this ?

Regards
-M3troidman

[EricE]

SSDs are NOT needed.  It's a firewall for goodness sake - any old hard drive will work fine. I have many running on old laptop hard drives that are slow, but obviously very reliable.

And I think OpnSense has the same option to run entirely out of a RAM disk if desired - and as you surmise you can configure it to send logs to a syslog server.

[opnfwb]

I'd recommend a hard disk. Especially on hardware that old the USB speeds are quite low. You'll have a much better experience using a hard disk, anything larger than 4GB should be fine.

[Inxsible]

and if usb is not a good enough alternative are there any cheap alternatives would an SD card trough a reader be better

What kind of interfaces do you have available on your G4? A new SATA SSD (128GB) costs about $20 on Amazon.

Does your G4 support m.2 SSDs?
I bought 32GB m.2 SSD for $6 off Ebay. That size is plenty for basic usage + VPN which is what I am using that box for.

The entire opnsense setup -- HP T730 (used) + i340-T4 NIC (used) + 32GB m.2 SSD (used) --  cost me only $126 USD.

[Ricardo]

and if usb is not a good enough alternative are there any cheap alternatives would an SD card trough a reader be better

What kind of interfaces do you have available on your G4? A new SATA SSD (128GB) costs about $20 on Amazon.

Does your G4 support m.2 SSDs?
I bought 32GB m.2 SSD for $6 off Ebay. That size is plenty for basic usage + VPN which is what I am using that box for.

The entire opnsense setup -- HP T730 (used) + i340-T4 NIC (used) + 32GB m.2 SSD (used) --  cost me only $126 USD.

HP proliant G4 server are from 2004-2008 timeframe. M.2 wasnt even in the dreams of its inventors...