I’ve recently started to get into pfSense so I thought about getting my own setup. This is what I have in mind, a cheap Dell PowerEdge R210 II from ebay with this I want to get a managed switch 24 or higher, was thinking about either a HP ProCurve 2810 or NetGear GS724T. I just have to ask whats the power consumption on these switches and are you able to disable unused port for energy saving? Along with this I am going to pick up an Intel Pro/1000 PT Quad Port NIC.
I also want to ask what size harddrive do you think I should get if I’m using squid with caching and is it worth it getting a cheap SSD?
I also have a Netgear R7000 Nighthawk that i will convert to an AP.
I have to add that I have no real networking knowledge except what I’ve learned from this forum and YouTube.
So essentially what I’m asking is what do you all think about this setup any advice on comments will be really appreciated.
Honestly, noise. Plain and simple, the R210 is a noise generating machine meant to be used in a rack, not in the household (personal experience).
If it were me, I'd get a cheap integrated Intel board or find something on craigslist locally. There is always a cheap computer on CL for $75 that has decent enough specs. Unless you plan on SSL inspection, web filtering, and other shenanigans, you can get extremely budget hardware. I ran a pfsense on an Intel D805 for a really long time before the motherboard died.
I read that people said that they can be noisy with the bios settings on a R210 but the noise was greatly reduced on the R210 II models and because the machine wont be under a lot of load it the noise wont be that much.
Craiglist doesn't have a lot to offer in my area cause its kind of small so the prices are also high. I also thought about building a small ITX build but the server side of things grabbed me, I'll look into that.
I got a great deal on Dell's entry level server- PowerEdge T20. Bare bones, it came with just 4GB ECC RAM, and a Xeon E3 1225v3 processor for $250. Granted, it only has room for four 3.5" HDD, plus two 2.5" HDD slots instead of an optical drive. It's small, rather quiet, and has been working great for over a year now.
An SSD won't make a difference for the squid cache as any small files which would benefit from it would already be cached in RAM. Size isn't much of an issue either as unless you have a ton of users and traffic you won't need a large cache. In fact if you only have a small number of users you're unlikely to see a difference with or without the cache, or at least not a positive difference.