One of my friends printed this tiny rack for a small switch and two micro PCs. It’s pretty cute and nifty

Same, hopped from PF to opn last year and really haven’t had to do too much besides updates. For somethings E

What would be the difference of running this as opposed to pf/opnsense? I know they use FreeBSD but I am not that versed in BSD based networking

Yeah I haven’t noticed any noise. It’s fanless and the whole outer case is the heatsink. It is pretty heavy for it’s size though

If you can find a cheap off lease/used enterprise workstation and get a decent nic that could take your budget down for a router . I was running an optiplex 9010 with a i340-T4 as my opnsense box for years and that was ~75 USD in 2020.

Edit: I ended up picking this little box a year ago for 60 bucks and love it. Way less awkward in the living room than a sff PC as a router.

I believe I would be fine on the network part, I am just guessing writing them to an SSD cache drive on my NAS would be fine? Im currently writing to the SSD and have a move script run twice a day to the HDDs

So dual NIC on each device and set up another lan on my router? Sorry it seems like a dumb question but just want to make sure.