SSri :
I work from home a lot and I need to route all my work traffic through VPN. I would definitely be putting VPN to route as much traffic as possible. I have 20 clients that access the net. This will be more. My internet speed is 300 down / about 30 up.
So you're going to set up your PFSense router at your house as a VPN client to your work network, is that right? That can be done, but it's not super-straightforward as I understand it.
Or is your workstation at home going to act as the VPN client?
What do you mean by "20 clients"? You have 20 people in your house? If not, how are those 20 people connecting to your PFSense Router?
If your PFSense box is regularly going to be pushing 200Mbps + over VPN connections then I can see why you wouldn't want to skimp on the CPU. It's not really about the number of clients, it's about the throughput, because all that data has to be encrypted/decrypted. Having said that, even the G4560 supports AES-NI, which I understand pfsense leverages for much more efficient processing of those workloads.
I don't claim to be an expert on this, so you might be better on a dedicated pfsense forum if you want to find out CPU requirements for a 300Mpbs VPN tunnel.
However... if your workstation is acting as the VPN client, then the router is not doing any of the encryption and all the hardware requirements fall back to your workstation (and your work's VPN server).
You are correct. My old stock is a plain mSata ad not M.2. It won't fit.
You can get a cheap mSATA to SATA adapter... it's the same protocol, so all the adapter/enclosure does is get pin-compatibility for standard SATA data and power connectors.
Here's an example from a UK store:
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/lycom-st-168m-msata-ssd-to-25-sata-drive-converter-with-25-frame
For the the Pfsense FW/Router, I have now come to three choices:
Refurbished HP z220 sporting Xeon E3-2270.v2 / E31220.v3 / i7 3770 workstation costing about £250-£300
New build using i3 7100 costing about £600
Netgate 2000 series for PfSense.
I don't know what a Netgate 2000 series is, but either of the other two would do the job, pending confirmation on the VPN requirements.
If you do build your own, I'd drop to the Pentium G4560... still supports AES-NI and you save nearly half the price for a few hundred mhz.