PI4/NUC is not the only choice. Any amd64 PC will be a good option. I am a bit sick of this forum being an advertising space for the Intel NUC. It is just another PC in a small form factor.
My current HA machine is a Lenovo Thinkcentre M72e. Tiny and indistinguishable from any other PC, just like a NUC.
Couldn’t agree more
X2. I scooped up an i5 small PC for $120 shipped with an SSD and 8gb of RAM. I have like 20 containers churning away on this thing, including 6 rstp streams through Frigate (with a coral too), and it is barely breaking a sweat. Besides the usual home assistant stack, im running stuff like nextcloud, guacamole, bitwarden, fail2ban, etc, and it just takes it all:
Those blips are me backing stuff up. I ended up with an HP Elitedesk but all these things are basically the same. There are a ton on eBay now for around $100.
Edit: 22 containers, plus other stuff, including gnome, all on Ubuntu 20.04:
Well yeah. I’ve been misusing the term NUC to mean any relatively tiny form PC. Mine is actually a Lenovo m92. I did replace the original rotating drive with an SSD.
There are edge cases where NUCs may be required, but largely they are not.
I run multiple VMs using Proxmox on an i5 Dell Optiplex 990, runs very well and without issue. The same machine records HD camera streams 24/7 using Shinobi, runs an MQTT server and a Plex server, among other things. I purchased on eBay for $100 AUD and only needed a $25 SSD to upgrade from the HDD it came with. The machine shipped with 8gb RAM, however I chose to upgrade that to 16gb after some time, but, only ever use about 8gb of it anyway. I use a Dell USFF 790 in my business, again, runs extremely well, no issues and another sub $100 purchase.
In all but extreme edge cases, a 2nd hand amd64 machine, like @nickrout mentioned, from eBay for less than $100 will happily do almost everything someone will want to do with HA. NUCs are highly overrated, and almost unnecessary for HA. If you have the cash burning a hole in your pocket, then sure, get a NUC, but there are better places to invest the money in HA, like an excellent network/router/AP if you have a budget to work within.
Yes, but you will need memory and ssd…
Ok, you’re all set. I would not take 4Gb but miniaml 8.
And TAKE A PRO SSD!!! read write on non-pro is dramatical low (quickly broken)
In comparison, this is half the price once you add your RAM and SSD. (just picked Germany eBay, not sure where you are located)
Looks good!
My location here is irrelevant because I am not buying anything right now. Just pointed out one possibility which I thought was reasonable. I really do not say it is better than anything else. I have two of those running HA and they have suited my needs well enough.
But yes it is great everybody can make their own choices based on their own preferences.
There is one downside using a overpowered server that is power consumption.
What do you consider high power consumption out of interest?
Power that I don’t need. If a 5W system is ok for my system using a 10W system is high power consumption.
I have been recommending actual NUCs because Intel has good Linux support, and they have been extremely reliable in the many years I have been using them at home and at work. They maintain the size, portability, and very low (relative to the outlet or a UPS load limit) power usage of an rpi, but are many, many times faster.
Compare that to SFF Lenovo, Dell, and HP machines… which always just sucked for some reason, then the proprietary PSU fails a year and a half in, and you find out they dont even sell those anymore, and when they did they cost 3 times a regular ATX PSU (rant…)
Even now, the 6 year old NUC i3 I have plugged into my TV is substantially more responsive than a brand new “smart tv” control interface like the Sony Android for running something like netflix or kodi.
That being said I am not even using them for HA at all, just an ATX tower workstation
Well my Lenovo was cheaper than my NUC (2nd hand). It has an external power supply which was cheap to replace (because of loss not crapping out). It has better performance too, which is only due to a slightly different intel processor.
I stand by saying NUC is not necessarily the bees knees, it is just the best known bee.
Your answer for RAM/SSD is highly appreciated and to be honest because of that I placed an order for an extra 4 GB RAM module to other NUC with HA. The price is here not the question, so cheap they are …
The question here is does it help? Right now my 4 GB RAM usage is around 24%. I think I have read somewhere two RAM modules work faster than one? If for instance taking snapshot is faster it is worth of every penny. Is it I do not know? Answer for this would also be highly appreciated.
My setups with both HA in NUC is HA NUC image, both systems have Deconz addon/integration, influx, Grafana, TP-link, 5 cameras and google home integration – both NUCs are behind Eaton UPS with Network UPS tool addon. I have around 150 entities in both systems.
Both NUCs have a RPI 3b+ as a backup (they sold them here 17 € a piece in local store). After a crash It takes only the time to load snapshot to backup RPI to have my system running again (can be done remotely).
What comes to SSD I sure believe PRO is better but is it worth for me I am not sure. If my SSD breaks down I can switch to a backup unit, load new image to another affordable SSD and get the NUC running again …. Sure my system is down for a short while but I can live with it.
Maybe I will change my mind when my first SSD crash happens, but so far with quite many SSDs (now 4 NUCs, 4 laptops, 2 RPis) I have been lucky – actually never in my life with computers (I am not a pro) starting from 80’s Ms Dos PCs with giant 10Mb hard drive I have not had a single mass storage failure with my entry level stuff. Early 80’s C64 is not counted here 
. Even my three RPIs with sd-cards have never had an issue. And I think I have read reliability of these SSDs have improved a lot lately compared to early SSDs – I am not sure about this ….
I think it depends on a lot of intended use, individual preferences etc. In musical instruments there is a term mojo. Somehow you can understand it here also. If you like something and you think it is best for you it is just great. For someone affordable used stuff makes that feeling and for another one it has to be new. There is no reason to argue about it. Facts are facts but still.
But it sure is always good to read opinions and advice to make it easier to create your own perspective and that’s why this community is very valuable for me. As a newbie I am learning every day. Thanks for that.
“two ram modules work faster than one”
This is true if the RAM is dual-channel (which it is in most cases).
So, it’s better to get 2x2GB than a single 4GB.
Your mileage may vary, but I’d be surprised if you come anywhere near using up 4GB in a virtual machine on a small PC. (I’ve got mine set to 3GB use and I end up around 20% use.)
I would go NUC over RPi. I have not used the RPi4, but when I had the 3 I had some stability issues. I ended up buying a used ThinkCenter Tiny PC and installed ESXi VMware server on it and then installed HassIO as pert MNetwork’s instructions: Deploying HassOS to ESXi
This gives you all the benefits and conveniences of the updates that come along with HassIO, but much faster reboots and an overall snappier system. I also did the MariaDB SQL add-on which really speeds up the loading of history and logs. My TinyPC is pretty low end and I think I paid less than or about $100 for it, and it is significantly faster than the RPi. So going with a NUC either low end or high end would yield you a faster and more reliable system over a RPi.
I would go with NUC over Pi. I had my install on a Pi4 with zwave and Zigbee sticks. There were all kinds of USB issues and the sticks failing (maybe due to power). I have not had these issues since moving to a NUC.
