FG-400 Vs FG-401

[Goldy]

Hi guys.

After many years, we are about changing our organizational firewall and move to Fortigate.

We are deliberating between two models:  FG-400F and FG-401F.
The main deference is that FG-401 has an internal storage (SSD), while the FG-400 has none.
My question:

1.  How crucial is it to have internal storage,
2. What the risk of not having one.
3. Does it have any performance influence.

Any help will be appreciated :smiling_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Regards,

Goldy

[ozkanaltas]

Hi @Goldy ,

If you have FortiAnalyzer, I think you do not need to choose the disc model.

Even if there is a disk on the device, FortiGate can keep logs for a maximum of 7 days.

Frankly, I have never seen any negative impact of the disk on performance. Just based on my past experiences, I can say that since too much data is written and read on the disk, the risk of corruption is higher than the risk of device failure. In the past, in such a situation, you had to repair the entire device. But I honestly don't know how the situation is right now.

[nathan_h]

Hi Goldy,

In addition to ozkanaltas's comment, it really depends on your requirement on how important logs for you. If you have external logging, you may not need the disk. Keep in mind, that if there is a connectivity issue to the external logging, you may lose the logs. Another advantage of having a disk is logs will still be retained after a reboot. You can actually extend the 7 days retention period but it is not recommended.

[Goldy]

Many Thanks.
My concern is that we have a lot of traffic (About 12TB daily and 150,000 concurrent connections).
In turn, it might produce many logs.
Also, this FW will work in high availability.

[nathan_h]

With that amount of logs, you may need FortiAnalyzer for Forward traffic logs. You can still have other logs, such as Event logs, to be stored on the disk.