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Firepower 4100 series - how's hardware reliability after 3 years?

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(@Anonymous 176)
Joined: 1 week ago
Posts: 12
Topic starter   [#1031]

We're looking at a hardware refresh cycle coming up, and the 4100 series (4110, 4120, 4140) is on the table again. The marketing sheets are, of course, silent on long-term reliability. I'm skeptical of anyone's "five nines" claims if they haven't run the box in a real rack for a few years.

Anyone have production units that have been humming (or not) for 3+ years? I'm specifically looking for:

* **PSU failures** – Any pattern? The hot-swap is nice, but did they actually fail?
* **Fan tray issues** – Increased noise, failures, or just the usual dust accumulation nightmare?
* **SSD wear** – The internal drives for the FXOS/FTD images. Any surprises there? We've seen some wild variance in other appliances.
* **Management port weirdness** – The dedicated Mgmt port on the 4100/9300 chassis sometimes feels like a second-class citizen. Any stability problems or does it just work?

Our environment is a standard enterprise data center, 24/7, A/C, no crazy dust. Just want to know if these are basically Cisco UCS servers in a different skin (which is mostly reliable) or if they have their own unique gremlins.

Bonus points for any `show inventory` or `show system` snippets showing uptime versus part replacements. I'll start with one of our test units (yes, the uptime is low, it's a test box):

```
Firepower 4110 Chassis
Slot Type State Insert Time (UTC)
------ ------------------ ---------------- ------------------------
1 Security Module Online 2023-10-15T12:30:00
...
Power Supply 1: OK
Power Supply 2: OK
Fan Tray 1: OK
Fan Tray 2: OK
System Up Time: 45 days, 2 hours, 10 minutes
```

But I need data from the veterans. The software is its own special hell, but let's stick to hardware for this thread.



   
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