A PC and lot of confusion on which installation

Installation
1

Hi everybody.
I have a PC with Core i3-2100 3,10GHz and 10 GB RAM.
I would like to implement HA to do the following things:

  • Integrate Zigbee sensors (window/door, pir, temperature/humidity);

  • Integrate two outdoor and three indoor cameras at first just as visualization and detection on HA and then, maybe, with a NVR;

  • Share files and multimedia between my other PCs and TVs;

Which installation is the best for my purpose?
How would the decision be influenced if I wanted to use the PC also for everyday use (internet browsing, Office…)?

Many thanks!

2

Is this a standard Desktop PC? If so, that’s gonna be a huge power use as it needs to run 24/7

Buy a Pi4 or similar for Home Assistant and use the PC for everyday use.

3

It’s a standard desktop PC.
Is the PI enough for Plex and cameras?

4

It will run HA and Plex and it should be able to handle a few camera streams since you won’t be watching all of them continuously but I don’t know about an NVR since it has to run the recording software and stream all the cameras simultaneously.

5

Do you think PI would handle Plex in case of transcoding?

6

I’m not sure. I don’t think any of my files need transcoding since I use native format for my streaming devices (mp4).

7

I still run a Plex server on a PI 2 but without transcoding, I need to add. I used to and it would handle it in many cases but often struggle. Can’t remember now if Plex allows you to set some transcoding parameters. A PI 4 might be able to, with its 4 cores.

As for running HA, I used to run it on a PI 3b+. It was mostly fine but sometimes a little sluggish. I would just advise not to put your DB on the SD card (the SD will fail, eventually, and probably sooner than you think/hope). Many users have an SSD connected. I switched from a PI to an old laptop with an SSD, put it on the LAN (used WiFi with the PI) and use a Postgres DB. Now it’s nice and snappy.

8

The answer to your question is that you should run proxox and run ha operating system on top of that.

Then you can use proxmox to run, say, debian or ubuntu to do the other stuff.

9

Just my 2 cents…

I’m using a laptop with w10 & plex (24/7)
HA runs on hyper-V on the same machine.
Had a bit of a challenge running CC2531 usb, but solved it with a ser2tcp…

10

Hi everybody and thank you for your support on this task.
I am testing this configuration:
Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 as main OS and the following containers in Docker-Compose: HA Core/Mosquitto/Zigbee2mqtt/Plex/Caddy/DuckDNS/Portainer.
No cameras yet but everything else seems to be ok.
CPU is running 2% load, RAM is running 50/60% load.
I’m a bit worried about the power consumption (and expenses too)…