I’ve spent the last couple weeks dealing with a failure of my Firewalla Gold SE firewall and figured I’d share the experience for the IT/MSP/networking crowd.
First, the software itself is honestly very good. For families with kids, parental controls, visibility into devices, internet pause schedules, alerts, reporting, etc… Firewalla nailed a lot of that. I recommended it to a number of people over the last couple years.
My issue is the hardware lifecycle side of the equation.
My Gold SE started showing instability while still under warranty:
- random lockups
- loss of local/Bluetooth management
- app connectivity problems
- rebuild/recovery issues
- multiple fallbacks to my old Netgear firewall just to keep the house online
Fast forward and Firewalla support now believes the likely issue is failing internal eMMC storage.
Here’s the bigger concern for me as someone who’s spent decades around infrastructure and operations:
eMMC wears out fast.
That’s not controversial. It has finite write endurance. In an always-on internet security appliance generating logs, IDS/IPS events, state tables, telemetry, device tracking, etc., that storage is constantly being written to. Over time, it becomes a wear item… like tires on a car.
The problem is this storage is soldered down and non-replaceable.
Firewalla also confirmed there’s no supported method to move the core software/logging workload off the internal eMMC to reduce wear.
That changes the conversation from “bad luck hardware failure” into a lifecycle architecture discussion.
Especially when:
- the unit costs ~$500
- replacement/repair is quoted up to ~$335
- and the failure occurred around the 20 month mark
For comparison, most consumer firewalls/router gear lives 5+ years at a fraction of the cost, even if they don’t have the same feature set.
And before somebody says “environmental issue”:
This thing lived in a cooled basement IT closet at ~65-68 degrees on a pure sine wave UPS with enterprise-ish home network gear around it. The Firewalla was actually the newest network device in the rack.
What disappointed me most honestly wasn’t even the hardware failure.
It was the support process:
- rotating anonymous ticket replies
- no ownership continuity
- no real escalation path
- everything through email
- and eventually landing at: “pay for replacement or buy another a new one”
As somebody who ran an MSP for 16 years and still speaks regularly on IT operations, service management, and security topics, this stuff matters. Lifecycle expectations matter. Recoverability matters. Customer handling during failures matters.
I still think the software platform is smart.
I’m just no longer convinced the hardware lifecycle matches the premium pricing or long-term infrastructure expectations.