Understanding Storage Needs

[topslakr]

Hello,

(This may belong in Hardware...)

I've placed an order this week for an APU2C4 (http://www.pcengines.ch/apu2c4.htm) which I am going to use for OPNSense. Having running pfSense for many years across a broad range of hardware I was surprised to see OPNSense wanted a 120GB+ SSD for an ideal setup and I'm curious to understand why. The largest storage I ever installed with pfSense was 4GB.

This will be my first hardware OPNSense router and will be installed in my home, handling nothing more taxing than a couple of port forwards and being an OpenVPN server so my concern isn't necessarily with this project; I'm more broadly curious.

Can I expect success with a 4GB mSATA drive or should I buy something larger? Is the 120GB recommendation in place to ensure long term durability with log writes? Is it in place to handle the storage needs of a large business using OPNSense for squid? Does OPNSense do something with storage that, for instance, pfSense doesn't do?

If I decide to move the routing hardware at my company over to OPNSense as well, but I don't enable squid, or captive portals, will I ever need more than 4GB of storage? The hardware recommendations page seems to increase the hardware requirements in lockstep assuming that both the user base and feature set grows and I'm curious to understand where I can expect to see my storage needs grow..

Thanks for your time,

[weust]

The 120GB is when you use a proxy or some service with lots of logging.
If you use it for a simple setup (like I do at home) 4GB is more then enough.

https://opnsense.org/users/get-started/ shows 120GB as Recommended when using pretty much all features.

[dcnblues]

I'm looking to build the same box, and am delighted by this information, finding this topic, and finding opnsense.org.  Very cool, and thank you.

[Strykar]

I tested IPFire, PFsense and OPNsense for 2 weeks as VMware guests on my APU2C4 with the Phison 16GB mSATA.
Zero issues.

My plan:

Get a quality tiny USB 3.0 pen drive like
Do a custom install, mount /var and /tmp to the USB drive. This should store all logs, Squid cache and write intensive stuff to the USB sparing precious write cycles on the SSD. Now you can cache, log and graph to your hearts content.