[Soekris] Talk me out of buying a net4801

[Jim Arnold]

Thanks in advance for humoring me with my unimportant story and  
questions...

For the last few years a FreeBSD box running IPF has been protecting  
my little home cable modem network. Back then I was having fun hacking  
around teaching myself Unix. Once I finally migrated to OSX from  
System 9 I  stopped playing around with Unix except for my little  
firewall and occasional peeks under OS X's hood.

A recent storm took out my power supply on that firewall box.  
Unfortunately it was a proprietary power supply. I liberated a FreeBSD  
box out of the closet loaded with FreeBSD 4.11 and tried to duplicate  
my old firewall. Despite extensive documentation of my old system  
files I could not get this new box to work as my firewall.

While searching around for a solutions I came across m0n0wall and  
PFSense. Getting them to install and work was very simple, especially  
PFSense, which was installed on a hard drive. Next I read about using  
a CF card instead of a hard drive. A few days later my IDE/CF adapter  
arrived and in minutes I had PFSense running off the compactflash  
card. My old Geek Hacker self was re-emerging. :)

Then I read about the Soekris boxes.

My router/firewall is in the basement so noise is not an issue. Now  
that I have the CF installed a power supply failure is the only weak  
link in the box. But since this was a home-built box it has a standard  
PS which will be easy to replace if necessary.

The only reason I can come up with to plunk down $243 for a 4801,  
power supply and shipping, is to save power.  I calculated my current  
router/firewall expends about 200 watts to run. That costs me $110 a  
year to power If my calculations are correct. If the 4801 takes 10  
watts to power that would cost $5.50 a year.

Is this a good enough rationalization?

What is a reasonable lifespan of a Soekris box?