Just built a new computer for my brother, and he's finally letting go of the old family Dell Dimension 8400. Once XP lost its support, he finally gave in. (about time if you asked me)
Anyways, the computer is still in decent shape, it has 4 GB of RAM, and I'm planning on picking up a new HDD for it. I also am in the market for a NIC, but because the GPU is occupying the one PCI-E slot, I am trying to determine whether or not to purchase a couple PCI legacy NICs.
After I install the pfSense os, should I rip out the ol' GTX 560 and put in a dual NIC, or should I just grab a couple legacy Intel PCI NICs like this?
Also, should I even be considering an SSD or will a cheap 7200 rpm HDD work just fine?
You don't even need a hard drive for pfSense, just run it off a USB stick (assuming the bios lets you boot from USB). I'd say spend that money on a cheap PCI VGA adapter and give a decent NIC the PCIe slot.
Just remember, the embedded version sacrifices a LOT of functionality...For example Squid can't use caching if you run off of Flash memory...I would recommend stealing a cheap 7200rpm HDD. I run mine off a Dell Dimension as well, and I just use an old 80GB 7200RPM pathetically slow IDE drive. It would be slow as crap for Windows, but runs PFsense just fine, no issues so far!