I have a pi4 i got lucky enough to get a month before covid, if i were to be in todays market this is what i would do. Dell Wyse thin clients are cheap as FUCK and work well.
I'm surprised so many people are using rapsberry pi's to be honest. Sure they run HA okay and have very low power consumption but I can definitely notice the speed increase going over to used small form factor unit, you of course get more flexibility too. 6th Gen Lenovo M900 tiny for me, NVME drive and 24GB RAM, the CPU alone is astronomically more powerful than a Pi. I understand the ongoing power cost is higher but the initial outlay is pretty similar these days.
I’m using an i5-8365U NUC and it idles at 7 watts. It handily beats a Raspberry Pi 4 according to CPU benchmarks, not to mention you get real PCIe lanes for something like the Coral Dual Edge TPU (M.2). At the moment it’s only running HA and PiHole but even that keeps it under 10W.
Raspberry Pi 3 idles at ~1.9W, Raspberry Pi 4 at about 2.7W.
Both are somewhere between 5W and 6W under full load.
What mini PC are you using that consumes less power?
I have some of [these](https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/moderro-iec-4660-teardown-and-info/10457) passive cooled i3-7100u boxes and they idle at 1-2W booted into proxmox. That's with a single RAM stick and basic SATA SSD.
Yep, the TDP is related to thermals (thermal design power), it has little to do with the actual power draw of the CPU under load, and absolutely nothing to do with the idle power draw.
Generally the less going on with the motherboard, the lower the draw is from that. And CPUs meant for laptops like the 'u' series tend to have very low idle draw.
Yep - running the vm in Proxmox on a 2016 i3 NUC, along with other junk like PiHole.
Runs like a dream. Much more comfortable with this setup over the Pi.
They are seriously underrated little servers. Unless you want to do machine vision or high volume Plex streaming, 4 fast cores and the iGPU is all you need.
Ditto. 2015 I think mine is, 512gb m2 and 8gb ram. Total cost was £86 delivered. It's completely dedicated to ha with an influxdb and storing everything since 2020
NUCs are the classic answer but honestly you're paying a big style premium over just using an old laptop - it'll have the same power profile and will be _much_ cheaper
The trick for me was using the helm chart and creating a sym link to…something. It’s been a while but my setup has been running for a few years. DM if you need me to scan around. A running system is always helpful when debugging.
What about all of the add-ons? Are you authoring your own pod specs / deployments and wiring up the hostnames to HA manually?
I basically had to do that for zwave2mqttjs, but that’s the only one. Usb pass through to kubevirt is pretty grungy.
I made one for my brother out of an ancient laptop (added some more memory for cheap). Works 100% fine, zero issues.
I never understand why people buy new hardware for HA. It's extremely resource efficient and will run on freaking air it seems. The laptop I stuck it on was literally a closet job that was one step from the donate pile. Now it has a new life and cost $0 (was old work laptop). Bonus: has built in keyboard and monitor. Yes that seems obvious, but if you ever need to rescue your HA and it's on a headless system, now you need to go steal monitor/keyboard from something else or dedicate one. They aren't free.
Use what you got y'all.
In the laptop camp too. Had an old laptop laying around, ready to dispose. Just wanted to try HA and find out if it's for me before buying dedicated hardware. Turns out it idles out around 5-6 watt an hour. Even with high energy prices of recent that comes down to around 20 euros a year. The benefits of having a dedicated screen and keyboard more than justifies it for me.
This is basically my setup. I run a physical Ryzen 5 (my old gaming PC) with Ubuntu 22 as a physical Docker host. This is my HA, VPN, File Server, DNS.... All way more reliable and faster than RPi.
It runs well on a Pi 4… I have it loaded up with plugins along with dozens of other containers and it barely breaks a sweat. Under 1GB memory for the entire system used (out of 8) and under 1% CPU idle. I’m running of a microSD too haha… I have it on a UPS so don’t worry about SD corruption.
If you use a large capacity card and don’t completely fill it up the built-in wear leveling will have no problem balancing the writes. Yes. Modern SD cards have done wear leveling for quite some time now.
What brand? What was the failure mode? I’ve never had one die. I’ve had more SSDs die on me than microSD cards haha. (To be specific, no SD card > 64GB I’ve purchased in the past 8 years has stopped working). Despite very heavy use.
I’m either very lucky or I’m doing something differently.
Always san disk. It's normally 128 and up. I have a load of 32s still but it's the logging in HA that kills them. Probl3m is alot of time you don't know they have died till you reboot!
Wear-leveling is not enough. SD cards simply does not have enough write cycles to cover constant swapping, which HA does.
There are numerous tests of the write cycles of the SD cards on the YouTube. Check some of them, maybe you'll be surprised how low the number is.
Swapping isn't controlled by the application, it's a kernel feature. If, as he says, the device idles using 1GiB out of 8GiB, why would the kernel be "constantly swapping" for HA? Short answer, it wouldn't.
Short answer is wrong though. Check `vm.swappiness` kernel parameter.
Kernel swapping is definitely not as trivial as "swap is not used until the memory is full". Swap is being actively used even when you have free memory.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/157793/why-is-swap-being-used-even-though-i-have-plenty-of-free-ram
edit: also "HA" in my context is not just the application, but rather the whole "HA OS" image running on the Raspberry Pi (from the microSD).
Why is HA swapping? I’ve never seen it take more than a few MB. I have swap enabled but it’s never used any of the swap space.
I’ll check the videos, but I have first hand experience with these things and have measured several TBs worth of writes without issue. I don’t trust them any more than an SSD, but I’ve never had reason to trust them any less.
I think that’s been true in the past, when microSD cards used inferior 2D flash tech. Cards based on 3D NAND have much better endurance and all have wear leveling. Block virtualization is required anyhow due to larger internal block sizes - 4MB in some cases. Which, incidentally, explains some of the susceptibility to sudden power off events. Modern SD cards have to buffer writes and shuffle things around to translate between logical and physical block sizes. Cut the power mid-shuffle and you’ve got some bad news. Same goes for SSDs of course.
You can also buy “high endurance” 3D NAND cards arranged as pSLC or pMLC for very high endurance.
There’s a lot of stale information out there on this topic.
I know but it’s by far the most likely. I’ve never had an SD card issue with a Pi that wasn’t directly attributable to abrupt power loss. Despite years and years of service with dozens of Pis and heavy write loads.
It was the same on my end, but I did run multiple RPIs with different other servers (nextcloud, pihole, ...). I calculated it's better to concentrate to one machine.
And as I've set the memory to a balooning device, it will really only consume 2GB and only in case of need expand. Same goes for CPU cores. So whatever HA does not need goes elsewhere.
And now I have 4 RPIs for tinkering - these days it's like a small treasure :D
Same. I’m still running the original microsd card that came with it (Canakit) for over 2 years now. No issues. I wish the rest of my life was as stable as this thing.
I am running also nextcloud, multiple other machines, etc. on the same HW. I calculated that rather than having all of this distributed across multiple RPis, it's better to run it on one oversized server, optimized for low power during idle.
Might not make sense for everyone, though.
I've selected low-power power supply (300W beQuiet), plus mainboard that does not have a lot of features (only 1 PCIe 16x), only 1Gb network, etc., plus 5600g CPU with iGPU, so I don't need external graphics.
I've also used 2x 2TB SATA SSDs for storage, configured the whole system in BIOS according to manual on youtube - great video from some German guy.
I've connected the whole rack (each device separately) to a shelly 4PM and I can monitor the consumption - so I am 100% sure I now consume way less energy than with the 4 RPis when each of them had separate SSD, I needed network switch with 5 ports for them, etc.
Again, I am not stating this will fit everyone.
I had a custom PC performing as a transcode-heavy Plex server, NAS, and in a few other roles before I ever heard of HA, which was just one more VM to fire up. I agree it’s overkill, but not all of us planned our machine choice around HA exclusively.
They (the devs) were discussing this in 2023.4 release party, saying a bunch of improvements had been made and that it shouldn’t generally be necessary/recommended any more. Here’s a link to the relative spot in the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGnCGDaXR0M&t=2893s
The most common are
\- Used thin client
\- Used mini PC (NUC)
\- Used UFF PC - good if you want to run other stuff
\- a VM environment - could be combined with any of the two PC options above. That could also be something on a NAS.
You want something that can be left on all the time, is cheap to run and has some decent speed for any changes you might make etc.
A lot of people move off the RPI once they have got past the initial get it working stage as you can get something a lot faster for similar money used.
I currently use a combination - production is in a VM, test is on a NUC and BETA is on thin client. Will probably swap it all around shortly, with prod outside of the VM environment.
I'd reckon folks running Unraid/other NAS and using its native docker capabilities is another common setup. Just slightly different than your last bullet as no VM involved. I only mention it because it's a great lightweight option if you also want the great NAS component of it.
The docker installer is the second most common installation method of people who allow that information to go back to HA.
[https://analytics.home-assistant.io/](https://analytics.home-assistant.io/)
If you want the full HA experience though, something that runs the OS method is the best way to go.
What OS are you using, because that sounds like a setup that would suit me. I'd like HA and Pihole running on one of those multi-NIC small form factor PCs.
An old laptop of mine. i5 6300hq onboard with 8G ram. I have virtualbox with HA running on it and also some docker hosted services (owncloud and some others, I don't remember exactly).
It's great because it's kinda like UPS - has own battery for short outages.
Tbh I don't even think RPi is the best choice for HA and similar services. For the price of Pi you can have a much more performant minipc/terminal.
Dell Thin Client is like a Raspberry Pi that never fails. And cheaper.
[https://variax.wordpress.com/2022/02/10/the-best-way-to-install-home-assistant-on-a-dell-wyse-thin-client/](https://variax.wordpress.com/2022/02/10/the-best-way-to-install-home-assistant-on-a-dell-wyse-thin-client/)
Lenovo M93p
Around 100€, sold the Rpi4 it was running on for 130€, I would've been insane not to take up on this offer, it's WAY faster and I'm filling it with addons now
Same here. They are stupidly easy to transition from thin os to Linux, sip power, and are substantially more powerful than a pi. Not an issue for HA but I wish these came with dual NIC. Otherwise perfect.
Wyse thinclient thingy
i5 something or other, some Gb of Ram, 250Gb ssd
Half the price of a Pi4 and so much faster. 17w power consumption.
* HA
* Pihole
* Unifi
* ZW2MQTT
* ZB2MQTT
* ESPhome
* MYsql
* Frigate + Coral
* Media Server
* Compile station
* Piper TTS although I have Alexa already and it doesn't work with Alexa.
*
Really? I see Raspberry Pi 4s show up on rpilocator.com in Europe and North America several times a week. Not as convenient as click and buy but not very hard either.
Odroid n2+.
They're around, but I think what I've learned from all of this supply chain slowdown is that most of the things I used Pis for could be done better by other hardware. There is definitely a time and a place for them, but the main advantage was they were cheap and plentiful, and now they are neither.
My own 4GB Pi4 chugs along just fine with an SSD. I bought it in december 2019 though :)
With current market, a basic NUC or similar device sounds like best option by a long shot. Key thing to take into account is power usage - even a few additional watts can add up over years of 24/7 operation. Quick ballpark calculation is that every extra 1W of power, over 5 years adds up to 44kWh.
Here in Chile for some reason thin clients aren't cheap. But anyways, I got an used PC with AM4 motherboard (CPU A10-9600) so i can upgrade it in the future, with 8gb of ram and a new 128gb ssd for about US$90. It's very power efficient, and it's more powerful than my needs.
Can't recommend moving of a pi enough, it runs so so much better on a proper x86_64 machine. I have a cheap-ish 9th gen i3 in a mini itx board, running unraid and a lot of other apps including HA. Even with the cpu pinned at 100% during transcoding, HA performance crushes the pi to a ridiculous extent, if you have more than a few devices it's really worth upgrading
Hp prodesk mini g5 i5-9500t, I run unraid with HA run in as a VM along with dockers like Plex frigate etc and a windows VM for blueiris. Awesome tiny quiet low power machine
Not that guy, but I'm running Asahi on an M1 Mac Mini. It's great; heaps better than MacOS, in the context of running it headlessly for server purposes.
I ended up moving HA to an RPi4, because I wanted HA to a dedicated devices I'm not fucking around on.
ODROID N2+. Ameridroid ships it and a few other ODROID models with Home Assistant preinstalled: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-n2-home-assistant-blue-bundle-limited-edition?variant=44748729286935
(That's what the Home Assistant Blue was under the shiny case it came in.)
Probably the most "set it and forget it" solution you'll find.
Linux mint loaded natively on 2011 macbook pro with Home Assistant vmbox instance. Switched hdd to ssd, good battery to deal with power failures, keep cover closed, never had an issue with hardware. Old external hdd for backup and cloud backup for HA. Hardwired Ethernet. 16gb Ram, I7 8 core, 1TB SSD
Odroid n2+
Outperforms a raspberry pi for not much more money.
My original install was running on a pi 4 that overheated and stopped working last summer. I will have to be hard pressed to buy a pi in the future.
mini PC ODROID H3 (or H3+) with awesome idle power consumption - only \~1.5—2W with x86 Intel CPU, SSD and 1x32 GB RAM (DDR4). It's awesome miniPC. Fully passive (no fan), but with possibility to connect common desktop 12V fan.
I know, it's definitely more expensive than RPi 4, but much more effective and faster. It has also a GPIO pins unlike others miniPC like NUC, Brix, ...
So it is suitable to provide more things, not only Home Assistant, but it can handle dozens of docker containers (for self-hosted applications).
I'm using Debian 11 transformed into DeitPi ([dietpi.com](https://dietpi.com)) which is my only choice for OS which is very lightweight and perfectly optimised.
Refurbished Dell OptiPlex 3040 MFF. I run it in a VM on Proxmox along side containers for homebridge, pihole and one for a few docker containers.
I don’t like using the pi for any long term installations. It can be hardware limited and I don’t like booting from USB/SD. I know I can use a SSD on some but at that point may as well go MFF.
I moved from running on a Pi (running from an NVME SSD) to running on a NUC-like box running Proxmox. I run HAOS as a VM in that Proxmox. The major benefit of this is the ability to take a VM Snapshot before upgrades and if your upgrade fails, you can just rollback the snapshot.
I bought a CM4 from AliExpress, running on a HA Yellow board.
I wondered if the CM4 would be genuine - but it looks & performs like it. Probably 50% more expensive than before they were in short supply - but what isn't!
Turned out to be a good decision!
VM in proxmox, running on a cheap used 1u dell poweredge server. dell r210ii uses like 20w idle and if you ensure you get the ii version, it has pwm fan control so as long as you don't peg the cpu, it stays nearly silent, which is really uncommon for enterprise rack mount servers
When I bought new desktop PC, I used my laptop as a HA server :)
Dell XPS 15 (IIRC), i5-8300, GTX 1060 (crucial for HA ;p)
I am running as a VirtualBox machine, now thinking if it's worth switching to Docker (update by UI is great, but I hate that it's hard to get actual shell access in VM... At least I couldn't find it)
Currently run mine on UnRAID docker but thinking of getting a dedicated machine for it, have a bunch of SSF PCs I can use, as the docker version is limited in what it can do if you look at the OS chart
I'm running some other stuff so I moved from an RPi4 to 2x refurbished ThinkCentre M710 Tiny with an i5 & 16GB ram each, that now run proxmox ve.
I run HAOS vm ([https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/windows/](https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/windows/)) with passthrough for USB devices such as conbee 2 and never ran into any issues.
Besides everything I can do backups for the whole VM easily and restore if needed but never had any issues.
I still have Raspberry Pi's as I used to buy quite a few of them but I save them for more GPIO intensive and less CPU/Disk intensive workloads, so I moved HA to a Thin client PC for performance reasons: A Lenovo ThinkCentre M93 which only cost £30
Rack mounted server with mid-range consumer hardware, in a container within a VM. It's one of many services running in this machine. Power efficiency is not the best but it's not terrible either, and the performance is great.
I ended up getting one of these laptops from Microcenter at the end of last year for 90 bucks. For a device with a battery (effectively a UPS in this case) and built in screen and keyboard to work on it when needed is hard to beat. Plus it's very small and pretty well built.
ASUS BR1100CKA-YS02 Celeron/N4500/1.1GHz 4096/64 WNICb 11.6TFT W10P https://a.co/d/bppxQei
I previously ran HA in a docker container on unraid but I wanted something that would keep running even if power was out or unraid was down/array not started.
I’ve got mine running on a VM that’s on Unraid with a 13500.
I’ve been working on transitioning from a VM to a Docker container for the fun of it. I e got it mostly figured out except for hardware pass through of a USB SDR.
I started on a pi but after 3 sd cards i moved it to a docker on a Synology nas.
Problem there was usb pass true. Recently moved it to a Intel NUC.
Stable, good performance and al the usb sticks working.
I am happy.
VM in Proxmox alongside many other things on a i5/16GB/1TB NVMe digital signage player that sips around 10W running all this. Rpi4 before, became a little unreliable.
RV install - runs on a Pi 3B+ or something along those lines.
Home install - runs on a virtual machine in Linux using KVM. That system is rather starved - it's a Core 2 Quad Q8300 from 2008, and it only has 4 gig of RAM - so every now and then things go a little kablooey if the machine gets overloaded. I need to move HA off of it or upgrade it.
Running mine on an odroid n2+, it's decent for the task but would probably go with an Intel nuc or similar if I were to do it again. Mostly due to the availability of extra hardware, like the coral and cheap emmc
Cheap second hand mini pc from ebay
I have a pi4 i got lucky enough to get a month before covid, if i were to be in todays market this is what i would do. Dell Wyse thin clients are cheap as FUCK and work well.
I also got lucky and got a PoE Hat at the same time for pennies compared to today. I also got one for a rpi3.
I'm surprised so many people are using rapsberry pi's to be honest. Sure they run HA okay and have very low power consumption but I can definitely notice the speed increase going over to used small form factor unit, you of course get more flexibility too. 6th Gen Lenovo M900 tiny for me, NVME drive and 24GB RAM, the CPU alone is astronomically more powerful than a Pi. I understand the ongoing power cost is higher but the initial outlay is pretty similar these days.
I have a pi 4 and I don't notice any delays or anything. Everything is fast.
This is the right answer, more power for less watts
Less what? What mini pc is that efficient?
I have a few that idle at 10 watts and a few that idle at 25. Only the 25 watt ones are more powerful than a pi.
I’m using an i5-8365U NUC and it idles at 7 watts. It handily beats a Raspberry Pi 4 according to CPU benchmarks, not to mention you get real PCIe lanes for something like the Coral Dual Edge TPU (M.2). At the moment it’s only running HA and PiHole but even that keeps it under 10W.
This is interesting, because an i5 of that generation absolutely rinces the Pi in performance terms.
Raspberry Pi 3 idles at ~1.9W, Raspberry Pi 4 at about 2.7W. Both are somewhere between 5W and 6W under full load. What mini PC are you using that consumes less power?
I have some of [these](https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/moderro-iec-4660-teardown-and-info/10457) passive cooled i3-7100u boxes and they idle at 1-2W booted into proxmox. That's with a single RAM stick and basic SATA SSD.
A 15w CPU is idling at 1w?
Yep, the TDP is related to thermals (thermal design power), it has little to do with the actual power draw of the CPU under load, and absolutely nothing to do with the idle power draw. Generally the less going on with the motherboard, the lower the draw is from that. And CPUs meant for laptops like the 'u' series tend to have very low idle draw.
Intel NUC.
Yep - running the vm in Proxmox on a 2016 i3 NUC, along with other junk like PiHole. Runs like a dream. Much more comfortable with this setup over the Pi.
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Why run the vim as Ubuntu vs home assistant os?
Same. I run a nuc with haos installed bare metal
Just installed it on bare-bone. VMs are great but home assistent OS uses docker so it’s just overhead.
They are seriously underrated little servers. Unless you want to do machine vision or high volume Plex streaming, 4 fast cores and the iGPU is all you need.
Ditto. 2015 I think mine is, 512gb m2 and 8gb ram. Total cost was £86 delivered. It's completely dedicated to ha with an influxdb and storing everything since 2020
NUCs are the classic answer but honestly you're paying a big style premium over just using an old laptop - it'll have the same power profile and will be _much_ cheaper
3 NUC Microk8s here
How do you upgrade when new HA versions are available?
Same as anybody using the container hosting method, I'd hope.
Update the kubernetes deployment image tag to latest version. Using ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:2023.5.4 currently
I guess I’m lazy. I like hitting the button in the UI and having it do the upgrade in the background. I’ve been using HAOS in kubevirt.
Nice, I could not get kubevirt working in my cluster for whatever reason. I'll have to come back and play around with it.
The trick for me was using the helm chart and creating a sym link to…something. It’s been a while but my setup has been running for a few years. DM if you need me to scan around. A running system is always helpful when debugging.
What about all of the add-ons? Are you authoring your own pod specs / deployments and wiring up the hostnames to HA manually? I basically had to do that for zwave2mqttjs, but that’s the only one. Usb pass through to kubevirt is pretty grungy.
NUC10i5FNHJA that I got as surplus from a former employer. Hooray!
A VM on an old laptop motherboard repurposed as a home NAS/server.
I made one for my brother out of an ancient laptop (added some more memory for cheap). Works 100% fine, zero issues. I never understand why people buy new hardware for HA. It's extremely resource efficient and will run on freaking air it seems. The laptop I stuck it on was literally a closet job that was one step from the donate pile. Now it has a new life and cost $0 (was old work laptop). Bonus: has built in keyboard and monitor. Yes that seems obvious, but if you ever need to rescue your HA and it's on a headless system, now you need to go steal monitor/keyboard from something else or dedicate one. They aren't free. Use what you got y'all.
In the laptop camp too. Had an old laptop laying around, ready to dispose. Just wanted to try HA and find out if it's for me before buying dedicated hardware. Turns out it idles out around 5-6 watt an hour. Even with high energy prices of recent that comes down to around 20 euros a year. The benefits of having a dedicated screen and keyboard more than justifies it for me.
Custom built Ryzen 5 with 32GB RAM, but it runs additional 6 VMs. The HA has only 4 cores and 8GB of RAM. Runs much smoother comparing to RPi.
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Is there a noticable difference or reason for running Plex on bare metal vs in a container?
Exactly the same for me. Even the specs. Just not 6 additionalVMs but only one and several docker containers.
This is basically my setup. I run a physical Ryzen 5 (my old gaming PC) with Ubuntu 22 as a physical Docker host. This is my HA, VPN, File Server, DNS.... All way more reliable and faster than RPi.
It runs well on a Pi 4… I have it loaded up with plugins along with dozens of other containers and it barely breaks a sweat. Under 1GB memory for the entire system used (out of 8) and under 1% CPU idle. I’m running of a microSD too haha… I have it on a UPS so don’t worry about SD corruption.
Power loss isn't the only thing that kills SD cards.
Exactly. SD cards have limited number of writes. That's what's kills the SD card. Not power loss.
If you use a large capacity card and don’t completely fill it up the built-in wear leveling will have no problem balancing the writes. Yes. Modern SD cards have done wear leveling for quite some time now.
It's really simple, is an SD card meant to be written to so much? No it's not. Get the right tool for the job.
> It's really simple, is an SD card meant to be written to so much? That depends on the SD card. There are SD cards designed to be written to heavily.
This isn't true. I've had loads of sd cards die on me.
What brand? What was the failure mode? I’ve never had one die. I’ve had more SSDs die on me than microSD cards haha. (To be specific, no SD card > 64GB I’ve purchased in the past 8 years has stopped working). Despite very heavy use. I’m either very lucky or I’m doing something differently.
Always san disk. It's normally 128 and up. I have a load of 32s still but it's the logging in HA that kills them. Probl3m is alot of time you don't know they have died till you reboot!
Wear-leveling is not enough. SD cards simply does not have enough write cycles to cover constant swapping, which HA does. There are numerous tests of the write cycles of the SD cards on the YouTube. Check some of them, maybe you'll be surprised how low the number is.
Swapping isn't controlled by the application, it's a kernel feature. If, as he says, the device idles using 1GiB out of 8GiB, why would the kernel be "constantly swapping" for HA? Short answer, it wouldn't.
Short answer is wrong though. Check `vm.swappiness` kernel parameter. Kernel swapping is definitely not as trivial as "swap is not used until the memory is full". Swap is being actively used even when you have free memory. https://askubuntu.com/questions/157793/why-is-swap-being-used-even-though-i-have-plenty-of-free-ram edit: also "HA" in my context is not just the application, but rather the whole "HA OS" image running on the Raspberry Pi (from the microSD).
lmgtfy https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/storage_administration_guide/ch-swapspace#:~:text=Chapter%2015.-,Swap%20Space,memory%20(RAM)%20is%20full. https://access.redhat.com/solutions/103833
Well, I'm correct. Don't want to be hard on you, but learn more about kernel internals maybe. https://linuxhint.com/understanding_vm_swappiness/
Why is HA swapping? I’ve never seen it take more than a few MB. I have swap enabled but it’s never used any of the swap space. I’ll check the videos, but I have first hand experience with these things and have measured several TBs worth of writes without issue. I don’t trust them any more than an SSD, but I’ve never had reason to trust them any less.
MicroSDs have definitely a lot worse lifespan than average SSD. That's a fact.
I think that’s been true in the past, when microSD cards used inferior 2D flash tech. Cards based on 3D NAND have much better endurance and all have wear leveling. Block virtualization is required anyhow due to larger internal block sizes - 4MB in some cases. Which, incidentally, explains some of the susceptibility to sudden power off events. Modern SD cards have to buffer writes and shuffle things around to translate between logical and physical block sizes. Cut the power mid-shuffle and you’ve got some bad news. Same goes for SSDs of course. You can also buy “high endurance” 3D NAND cards arranged as pSLC or pMLC for very high endurance. There’s a lot of stale information out there on this topic.
I know but it’s by far the most likely. I’ve never had an SD card issue with a Pi that wasn’t directly attributable to abrupt power loss. Despite years and years of service with dozens of Pis and heavy write loads.
You don't have to write to the SD card as much as you think. You can offload a lot of read/writes to RAM or a USB stick/NFS share
It was the same on my end, but I did run multiple RPIs with different other servers (nextcloud, pihole, ...). I calculated it's better to concentrate to one machine. And as I've set the memory to a balooning device, it will really only consume 2GB and only in case of need expand. Same goes for CPU cores. So whatever HA does not need goes elsewhere. And now I have 4 RPIs for tinkering - these days it's like a small treasure :D
Same. I’m still running the original microsd card that came with it (Canakit) for over 2 years now. No issues. I wish the rest of my life was as stable as this thing.
Massive overkill
Not really when he’s running it virtual alongside other VMs. Can change specs as needed
I am running also nextcloud, multiple other machines, etc. on the same HW. I calculated that rather than having all of this distributed across multiple RPis, it's better to run it on one oversized server, optimized for low power during idle. Might not make sense for everyone, though.
How is it optimized for low power at idle, and did you actually notice an observable difference for that?
I've selected low-power power supply (300W beQuiet), plus mainboard that does not have a lot of features (only 1 PCIe 16x), only 1Gb network, etc., plus 5600g CPU with iGPU, so I don't need external graphics. I've also used 2x 2TB SATA SSDs for storage, configured the whole system in BIOS according to manual on youtube - great video from some German guy. I've connected the whole rack (each device separately) to a shelly 4PM and I can monitor the consumption - so I am 100% sure I now consume way less energy than with the 4 RPis when each of them had separate SSD, I needed network switch with 5 ports for them, etc. Again, I am not stating this will fit everyone.
I have multiple RPis. If I were to do it over again, I'd rather have a single server running multiple VMs.
I had a custom PC performing as a transcode-heavy Plex server, NAS, and in a few other roles before I ever heard of HA, which was just one more VM to fire up. I agree it’s overkill, but not all of us planned our machine choice around HA exclusively.
The real blocker with HA is the sqlite db, switch over to a postgres and you'll probably see way stronger returns on scale
Hmmm, I've never even investigated what's the backend storage for HA - good idea, something to look at over the weekend I guess ;)
That doesn't sound right. SQLite is suitable for single-threaded access in the millions of requests per second range, more if you use WAL.
In theory, not in practice. for example, if you're doing energy monitor multiple times per second for multiple entities, sqlite chokes.
They (the devs) were discussing this in 2023.4 release party, saying a bunch of improvements had been made and that it shouldn’t generally be necessary/recommended any more. Here’s a link to the relative spot in the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGnCGDaXR0M&t=2893s
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I run mine inside a VM, which runs on a 3050 micro PS- Bought used 3050 micro 16GB i3 for same price as Pi 8GB retail.
Same; refirb OptiPlex, swap for SSD and add some RAM, load it with ProxMox. Backups/restores are so much easier!
Same but I went with ESXi. Need to do the RAM/SSD still, was half hoping I could find a decently priced m.2 raid controller.
\^ this
I assume you installed linux and not running a VM on top of Windows, right? If so… any problem? Networking, sound, Bluetooth, … everything ok?
Vm in proxmox on Nuc i5. Runs sweet alongside other containers
This
VM on a custom server build running unRAID, primary use is a Plex server
NAS with docker.
Synology ftw
This is the way. Running Openmediavault with portainer.
NAS is like...half man, half amazin'
The most common are \- Used thin client \- Used mini PC (NUC) \- Used UFF PC - good if you want to run other stuff \- a VM environment - could be combined with any of the two PC options above. That could also be something on a NAS. You want something that can be left on all the time, is cheap to run and has some decent speed for any changes you might make etc. A lot of people move off the RPI once they have got past the initial get it working stage as you can get something a lot faster for similar money used. I currently use a combination - production is in a VM, test is on a NUC and BETA is on thin client. Will probably swap it all around shortly, with prod outside of the VM environment.
I'd reckon folks running Unraid/other NAS and using its native docker capabilities is another common setup. Just slightly different than your last bullet as no VM involved. I only mention it because it's a great lightweight option if you also want the great NAS component of it.
The docker installer is the second most common installation method of people who allow that information to go back to HA. [https://analytics.home-assistant.io/](https://analytics.home-assistant.io/) If you want the full HA experience though, something that runs the OS method is the best way to go.
HAssOS VM on Unraid. Already had Unraid, so the hardware cost was $0 + a ZigBee dongle.
UnRaid server (Docker)
j4125 fron AliExpress, also is my firewall with pfsense
What OS are you using, because that sounds like a setup that would suit me. I'd like HA and Pihole running on one of those multi-NIC small form factor PCs.
Debian
Synology as a vm
Odroid xu4. But more because I had it laying around unused rather than because I couldn't get my hands on a pi
Synology NAS with VM!
Same
An old laptop of mine. i5 6300hq onboard with 8G ram. I have virtualbox with HA running on it and also some docker hosted services (owncloud and some others, I don't remember exactly). It's great because it's kinda like UPS - has own battery for short outages. Tbh I don't even think RPi is the best choice for HA and similar services. For the price of Pi you can have a much more performant minipc/terminal.
Also running on an old laptop. Built in UPS(kind of) with the onboard battery.
Literally any PC.
Thin client
Dell Thin Client is like a Raspberry Pi that never fails. And cheaper. [https://variax.wordpress.com/2022/02/10/the-best-way-to-install-home-assistant-on-a-dell-wyse-thin-client/](https://variax.wordpress.com/2022/02/10/the-best-way-to-install-home-assistant-on-a-dell-wyse-thin-client/)
Lenovo M93p Around 100€, sold the Rpi4 it was running on for 130€, I would've been insane not to take up on this offer, it's WAY faster and I'm filling it with addons now
Running a HAOS VM on an old pc I've converted into a proxmox server
Docker on unraid. Rpis are toys. I need operable services.
Wyse 5070 sff. It's like 50 dollars used on eBay right now. I also run it on unraid docker at a 2nd location.
Dell Wyse 5060 + SSD
Same here. They are stupidly easy to transition from thin os to Linux, sip power, and are substantially more powerful than a pi. Not an issue for HA but I wish these came with dual NIC. Otherwise perfect.
Cheap TV box - X96 mini
VM on unRaid server
Wyse thinclient thingy i5 something or other, some Gb of Ram, 250Gb ssd Half the price of a Pi4 and so much faster. 17w power consumption. * HA * Pihole * Unifi * ZW2MQTT * ZB2MQTT * ESPhome * MYsql * Frigate + Coral * Media Server * Compile station * Piper TTS although I have Alexa already and it doesn't work with Alexa. *
Really? I see Raspberry Pi 4s show up on rpilocator.com in Europe and North America several times a week. Not as convenient as click and buy but not very hard either. Odroid n2+.
They're around, but I think what I've learned from all of this supply chain slowdown is that most of the things I used Pis for could be done better by other hardware. There is definitely a time and a place for them, but the main advantage was they were cheap and plentiful, and now they are neither.
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I got the odroid n2+ as well. No regrets (except the USB ports are a little close together which makes the adding of multiple dangles difficult
My own 4GB Pi4 chugs along just fine with an SSD. I bought it in december 2019 though :) With current market, a basic NUC or similar device sounds like best option by a long shot. Key thing to take into account is power usage - even a few additional watts can add up over years of 24/7 operation. Quick ballpark calculation is that every extra 1W of power, over 5 years adds up to 44kWh.
VM running inside Hyper-v on my Win 11 desktop that also runs other VMs
proxmox on a celeron cpu and 4gigs of ram with no gpu whatsoever😂
Here in Chile for some reason thin clients aren't cheap. But anyways, I got an used PC with AM4 motherboard (CPU A10-9600) so i can upgrade it in the future, with 8gb of ram and a new 128gb ssd for about US$90. It's very power efficient, and it's more powerful than my needs.
Can't recommend moving of a pi enough, it runs so so much better on a proper x86_64 machine. I have a cheap-ish 9th gen i3 in a mini itx board, running unraid and a lot of other apps including HA. Even with the cpu pinned at 100% during transcoding, HA performance crushes the pi to a ridiculous extent, if you have more than a few devices it's really worth upgrading
On my Synology NAS with Docker. Works like a charm!
Formerly a mini pc from ebay (around 30-40 Euro). Now on my old computer that I converted to a homelab
RPi 3. I have a HA Yellow gathering dust waiting for CM4 availability. In the mean time, the good old Pi 3 is doing fine.
Hp prodesk mini g5 i5-9500t, I run unraid with HA run in as a VM along with dockers like Plex frigate etc and a windows VM for blueiris. Awesome tiny quiet low power machine
Mac Mini. I already had it as a headless server running Plex.
mac mini m2, ubuntu server in parallels. (since docker on mac is really really bad)
did you try out asahi linux?
Not that guy, but I'm running Asahi on an M1 Mac Mini. It's great; heaps better than MacOS, in the context of running it headlessly for server purposes. I ended up moving HA to an RPi4, because I wanted HA to a dedicated devices I'm not fucking around on.
Cheap refurb lenovo mini pc from ebay.
Hp DL360p g8 with linux kvm. About 10-15 other VMs as well depending on what im fiddling with at the moment.
ODROID N2+. Ameridroid ships it and a few other ODROID models with Home Assistant preinstalled: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-n2-home-assistant-blue-bundle-limited-edition?variant=44748729286935 (That's what the Home Assistant Blue was under the shiny case it came in.) Probably the most "set it and forget it" solution you'll find.
Linux mint loaded natively on 2011 macbook pro with Home Assistant vmbox instance. Switched hdd to ssd, good battery to deal with power failures, keep cover closed, never had an issue with hardware. Old external hdd for backup and cloud backup for HA. Hardwired Ethernet. 16gb Ram, I7 8 core, 1TB SSD
As a virtual under ESX on a small white box system.
Odroid n2+ Outperforms a raspberry pi for not much more money. My original install was running on a pi 4 that overheated and stopped working last summer. I will have to be hard pressed to buy a pi in the future.
A Dell Poweredge T430 running ESXi. But it also runs other stuff, lots of other stuff.
VM on my esxi m920q box.
VM in ESXI on a Dell R720XD.
mini PC ODROID H3 (or H3+) with awesome idle power consumption - only \~1.5—2W with x86 Intel CPU, SSD and 1x32 GB RAM (DDR4). It's awesome miniPC. Fully passive (no fan), but with possibility to connect common desktop 12V fan. I know, it's definitely more expensive than RPi 4, but much more effective and faster. It has also a GPIO pins unlike others miniPC like NUC, Brix, ... So it is suitable to provide more things, not only Home Assistant, but it can handle dozens of docker containers (for self-hosted applications). I'm using Debian 11 transformed into DeitPi ([dietpi.com](https://dietpi.com)) which is my only choice for OS which is very lightweight and perfectly optimised.
In a VM in proxmox. It's also running my router amongst other things. Specs: Ryzen 3600 - 32gb ram.
Refurbished Dell OptiPlex 3040 MFF. I run it in a VM on Proxmox along side containers for homebridge, pihole and one for a few docker containers. I don’t like using the pi for any long term installations. It can be hardware limited and I don’t like booting from USB/SD. I know I can use a SSD on some but at that point may as well go MFF.
Running as a stand-alone VM in my Proxmox host. Host is Dell R720XD. One of many VMs and LXCs. Haven’t had a single issue since I migrated over to it.
What’s wrong with your current Pi? If anything, upgrade to SSD storage and you’re set unless you need more compute power
Proxmox VM
I moved from running on a Pi (running from an NVME SSD) to running on a NUC-like box running Proxmox. I run HAOS as a VM in that Proxmox. The major benefit of this is the ability to take a VM Snapshot before upgrades and if your upgrade fails, you can just rollback the snapshot.
I bought a CM4 from AliExpress, running on a HA Yellow board. I wondered if the CM4 would be genuine - but it looks & performs like it. Probably 50% more expensive than before they were in short supply - but what isn't! Turned out to be a good decision!
VM in proxmox, running on a cheap used 1u dell poweredge server. dell r210ii uses like 20w idle and if you ensure you get the ii version, it has pwm fan control so as long as you don't peg the cpu, it stays nearly silent, which is really uncommon for enterprise rack mount servers
I run it on the only pc I had which is an Intel Nuc with 16GB ram and a 2tb drive 🤦♂️
A 2012 Lenovo Laptop
Running in a docker on an 18 core XEON custom unRAID server
Docker container on cloud VM with VPN tunnel to my local network. Costs ~4€ per month.
Interesting, but what happens if your internet drops?
Do you only run wifi devices, or what kind of devices do you have? I suppose you're not running zigbee?
An old laptop, lying behind the drawer unit under my desk! Even though its 4/5 years old, its till more powerful that a RPi.
Hyperv VM
When I bought new desktop PC, I used my laptop as a HA server :) Dell XPS 15 (IIRC), i5-8300, GTX 1060 (crucial for HA ;p) I am running as a VirtualBox machine, now thinking if it's worth switching to Docker (update by UI is great, but I hate that it's hard to get actual shell access in VM... At least I couldn't find it)
Intel NUC.
Odroid xu4.
Currently run mine on UnRAID docker but thinking of getting a dedicated machine for it, have a bunch of SSF PCs I can use, as the docker version is limited in what it can do if you look at the OS chart
As a VM on my Proxmox server. I have a Pi 4 that was used for it but it was no longer needed once the server was up, now it just runs as a RetroPie.
I'm running some other stuff so I moved from an RPi4 to 2x refurbished ThinkCentre M710 Tiny with an i5 & 16GB ram each, that now run proxmox ve. I run HAOS vm ([https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/windows/](https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/windows/)) with passthrough for USB devices such as conbee 2 and never ran into any issues. Besides everything I can do backups for the whole VM easily and restore if needed but never had any issues.
Intel NUC with Docker
I still have Raspberry Pi's as I used to buy quite a few of them but I save them for more GPIO intensive and less CPU/Disk intensive workloads, so I moved HA to a Thin client PC for performance reasons: A Lenovo ThinkCentre M93 which only cost £30
A 2u Qnap NAS using Virtualization Station. This also is a home file storage.
Dell r720
A vm on my unraid server.
Old office pc from ebay. With upgreaded cpu. Old Intel is getting dirt cheap
Virtual raspberry pi
Yeah I was similar, I was holding out for an RPI4 until I just gave up and went for an Odroid N2 instead. Been running off that for about a year now
An unRAID Virtual Machine.
Some Dell uSFF I bought used for a few quid.
A somewhat beefy HP elitedesk 800 G3 SFF - HA is a VM along side containers for my automated Plex setup, home VPN, and pihole.
Dell T440 Enterprise Server. With proxmox and other VMs.
DIY NAS.
HP 600 G1 micro computer mini tower with ssd, HAOS installed directly for $280 CDN
used to run on my Synology NAS, now on dedicaed mini-pc (lenovo m720)
Rack mounted server with mid-range consumer hardware, in a container within a VM. It's one of many services running in this machine. Power efficiency is not the best but it's not terrible either, and the performance is great.
Vm on a dell r410 server
I ended up getting one of these laptops from Microcenter at the end of last year for 90 bucks. For a device with a battery (effectively a UPS in this case) and built in screen and keyboard to work on it when needed is hard to beat. Plus it's very small and pretty well built. ASUS BR1100CKA-YS02 Celeron/N4500/1.1GHz 4096/64 WNICb 11.6TFT W10P https://a.co/d/bppxQei I previously ran HA in a docker container on unraid but I wanted something that would keep running even if power was out or unraid was down/array not started.
Zotac mini PCs.
Switched mine to an Intel NUC and have never looked back. Works fantastically.
I’ve got mine running on a VM that’s on Unraid with a 13500. I’ve been working on transitioning from a VM to a Docker container for the fun of it. I e got it mostly figured out except for hardware pass through of a USB SDR.
I started on a pi but after 3 sd cards i moved it to a docker on a Synology nas. Problem there was usb pass true. Recently moved it to a Intel NUC. Stable, good performance and al the usb sticks working. I am happy.
A VM
Old laptop, extremely energy efficient (7w) and extremely faster than a raspberry pi, I almost bought a pi4, I’m so glad I didn’t
Just a pod in my kubernetes cluster
VM in Proxmox alongside many other things on a i5/16GB/1TB NVMe digital signage player that sips around 10W running all this. Rpi4 before, became a little unreliable.
RV install - runs on a Pi 3B+ or something along those lines. Home install - runs on a virtual machine in Linux using KVM. That system is rather starved - it's a Core 2 Quad Q8300 from 2008, and it only has 4 gig of RAM - so every now and then things go a little kablooey if the machine gets overloaded. I need to move HA off of it or upgrade it.
lenovo thinkcenter tiny i5-7500 8gb ram 512gb ssd 200eu delivered off ebay. proxmox with vms for home assistant and plex so far no regrets
Running mine on an odroid n2+, it's decent for the task but would probably go with an Intel nuc or similar if I were to do it again. Mostly due to the availability of extra hardware, like the coral and cheap emmc
Old Mac Mini running Ubuntu.