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XG105W Review

SophosStorm

So I thought it was time to do a small review on the XG105W, in a nut shell I don't think this product is good value. In fact, I think it's a low grade product. I started trying out the XG210 for work, seemed ok so I picked up XG85W for home so I could roll out updates first at home then at work. The 85 lasted about a month, complete junk, rebooting continually, unresponsive, even had it swapped out during that month but exact same issues. Out came my pocket book to spend more money to upgrade to the XG105W, although slightly faster its still a terrible product in my opinion. It's very sluggish, wifi is continually is in and out, in fact its so bad I'm having to reboot almost every few days.

After approx. 2 years using these XG's I can say I would honestly not recommend them, they are not enterprise products by any means. For myself once the 3 year subscription is done I will replace with an actual enterprise product, for work, I cant say just yet but I can see us moving to aother product, it was a poor decision on my part.

Very disappointed with this product.



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  • 0 in reply to SophosStorm

    SSLVPN is replaceable with newer sophos connect which is much easier to setup a heartbeat for vpn users. It's a simple checkbox in the config to get it turned on, I recommend trying that if you still have a chance to keep XG

  • 0 in reply to SophosStorm

    I have an xg105w rev 3 that ran a 25 person office with multiple vpn tunnels always on. Your equipment rev2? Or rev1???

    I also had a xg 105 rev2 that ran the same office for a few years before this one.

  • 0 in reply to apalm123

    OK.  I finally found one XG115 rev 3 on EBay.

    This is the minimal Sophos should sell.  It has a 4 gig sodimm (instead of 2 for the 105) inside but seems to hit the 32 bit barrier and shows just a little over 3.2 gig.  So in real live it is only an additional 1 gig compare to the XG105.

    Cpu is a bit faster ...  200 ghz more, but more importantly, it has 4 cores instead of 2.  You feel the difference while accessing graphics on the appliance's WEB ui.

    Storage is still 64 Gig SATA SSD.  M2 form factor instead of 2.5".  Crap !!! If at least they had selected an NVMe storage. What's the fucking point ?  for $1 more you would have a NVMe 128 gig. That's ridiculous.

    So ready to test v18 tomorrow.

    Paul Jr

  • 0

    Ok.  I booted my 3 "home" devices today and booted them with a CD rom loaded with test utilities.

    There is absolutely no doubt that an XG105 upgraded to 4 gig of memory and a 256 gig SSD performs as well if not outperforms an XG115 in most situations.

    I checked today.  $20 for an 256 gig SSD, and another $20 for 4 Gig of memory.

    With those two hardware upgrades, the XG105 becomes faster than an XG106 all around.

    There is absolutely no question about it.  With a maximum of $50 of hardware upgrade, an XG105 will run v18 as well if not better than an XG115.

    This is immoral and Sophos has to behave as a responsible corporate citizen.  Our planet is already flooded with waste.

    Rethink it Sophos.

    Paul Jr

  • 0 in reply to Big_Buck

    Why do you think this is the case? The XG115 has 4GB memory too. Is the ram faster?

     

    Also did you get v18 to install onto your XG105 after the upgrades? I too think it's a real shame, because they were selling XG 105 just last year. I bought a few..... one of them less than 12 months ago and to think I can't use it for v18 is really disappointing. They should provide an upgrade path.

  • 0 in reply to apalm123

    Hello

    No.  v18 will not upgrade or install on an XG105.

    The XG105 out of the box has only 2 gig of memory.  I cannot confirm 100% yet, but on average, v18 seems to use around 1 gig of memory more than v17.5.8 for the same configuration.  That was measured over few hours only.  So, no conclusion yet. There's also the storage, XG105 SSD are among the slowest I ever seen.  Much the same speed as an old hard disk drive.  The same Transcend SSD in 256 gig size is around four time faster.  I also suspect that during v18 installation, since these SSD are so slow, files decompression (if there's any) would become a serious problem.  OEM Transcend is a 2.5" device.

    XG115 rev3 still uses 64 gig but in a SATA/m2 format.  Why on earth they have not selected NVMe instead and avoid all SATA driver layer altogether ? Go figure.  Still, XG115rev3 storage is much faster than XG105rev2's storage.  3 to 4 times.  Finaly, you cannot easily put NVMe storage on rev2 devices.

    So.

    XG105 with original memory and storage would suffer with v18.

    v18 is slower than v17.5.8, but as Sophos pointed out clearly, it is an EAP with no optimisation done yet.

    All in all, for $50 hardware upgrade, anyone can run v18 on a XG105.

    Paul Jr

  • 0 in reply to Big_Buck

    What memory modules are compatible, I'd like to at least amp up the performance. How would you reinstall the Sophos software if you replaced the harddrive? Thank you

  • 0 in reply to SophosStorm

    For a XG105 REV2: Sodimm, DDR3L 1.35volts, 1600 SO.  Important: DDR3 1.5 volt will not work.

     

    As for the SSD, it is a standard 2.5 in SATA 6.  You select the quickest you can find.  They are up to 600MB/S.  The faster tend to be the larger.  You most probably do not need above 128 gig, but 256 gig tend to be at least twice as fast as 128 Gig and 4 times faster than 64 Gig.

    To re-install, you download the firmware ISO from Sophos WEB site. 

    "ISO" !!!  You burn a CD or create a bootable USB key than boot your appliance with it.

    This process is described in detail on some Sophos post.

    Paul Jr

  • 0 in reply to Big_Buck

    Very much appreciated, I think I have changed my mind upgrading, looking at replacing with Cisco's Firepower 1010 NGFW and just ditch the 105W. Thank you though for all the effort.

     

    Darryl

  • 0 in reply to Big_Buck

    Thanks I added a 8GB stick to help with the maxed out memory, runs at 51% mostly. No SSD upgrade, don't want to invest any more money into this product, time for a Cisco upgrade after the subscription runs its course.