Part 2: Hardware - Search for the perfect home router/firewall (revisited)

It took me a while to come up with what I consider to be the ultimate hardware for my home router/firewall. I looked at Soekris and PC-Engines Alix and although they have great reputations and are commonly used for firewalls I felt that their products were just too underpowered and expensive. So I decided to put something together myself. My requirements:

- relatively low power
- 4-5 Gigabit NICs. Preferable Intel or Via (Realtek seems to get a bad rap on some forums)
- small form factor
- Flash IDE Disk
- 2+ GB RAM
- fanless and quiet

Here's what I put together:

- Atom N270 Intel D945GSEJT mini-ITX. Not as powerful as the 330 but with a low power mobile chipset. Bought it from Logic Supply. $99
- One advantage of the Intel D945GSEJT is you just need an AC/DC adapter. No additional power supply necessary. I picked up this 12V/5A from Logic Supply for $21. Probably didn't need 5A but we'll see.
- RouterBOARD IN/G44V PCI 4-port Gigabit VIA. Bought it from QuickLink Wireless. $90
- Transcend JM800QSU-2G 2GB DDR2 800 SO-DIMM. $42.99 from Amazon
- M350 Enclosure and riser from mini-box. $39.95 for the case and $9.95 for the riser. The riser is a critical part of the setup because it lets me fit a rather large PCI card into the case.
- 8GB 44 pin Embedded Disk Card 4000. Also from mini-box. $89.99 Definitely some cheaper ones out there and I didn't really need 8GB but I figured it would help with wear leveling and the extra space could be useful if I re-purposed the box. Also this one has higher MTBF than some of the cheaper products I saw.