There are a lot of blog-posts about people’s hardware setup, and I’ve looked at the Home Assistant Yellow. I am curious however for advice on upgrading my hardware from the community here. Note that I would love a Blue (but sold out) or a Yellow (but not patient enough to wait till november). I’m currently running HA on a Pi4 and an SD card, and a Sonoff Zigbee Dongle.
Main things I am looking for:
Easy to get HA running on and keep updated. I am NOT a hardware person. Flashing the Sonoff Zongle was pretty much the scarriest thing I ever did and don’t want to repeat I like the Pi / SD setup as it was simple to setup and let me focus on the software.
No interest in using Core, I’m fully happy with the Supervised version.
I mainly let HA run a lot of Node Red based automations.
Easy to port my current installation to the new hardware.
Looking for something that is mainly quite dependible. A bit worried about the SD card dying on me. It’s also already 50% full.
I have indeed already thought about that. Was curious if other things would also help. I notice the core RAM usage for example is at a steady 34 / 35 % use. Looking for a bit of a stable setup when starting to use it more and more.
The best way to get better performance out of HA is add RAM - state of all your entities are in RAM from system startup. So you need enough RAM to run the OS, Supervisor, any Addins, HA Core AND all of your entities and states. RAM is cheap.
Buuuuut. Considering you’re on a Pi memory upgrade may not be an option. (You have to replacing the device itself, so your same issues apply). That means skip to next…
Storage - SSD all the way. Its an easy upgrade. (backup your current box, install the ssd/os/bog standard HA install. Then restore your backup.). It makes the recorder db run much better as well as preventing your installation from catering because its running on an SD (not if, when, SDs have limited write lifetimes.).
If you go SSD on a pi. Pay special attention to making sure any Zigbee / ZWave dongles are not on the same USB bus as the SDD and that you put the sticks on a USB extension (mines a 1m extension) to get them away from potential RF interference. (USB3 SSDs are notorious for hammering Zigbee with interference, for instance)
If you dont do the SSD upgrade then look on the forums for info about tuning the recorder DB to limit writes to extend your SD life.
I may indeed just get a new case that can hold an ssd and an ssd as a start. Perhaps just get s new Pi with more ram. Did notice they are out of stock everywhere here.
Any advice on the SSD?
I did already let the recorder write in intervals of 30 seconds.
Overall I am noticing my HA is getting slow. Updates it now seems stuck on sometimes. Perhaps making the wrong conclusions, but fearing the SD card is dying?
I ordered an ssd, it seems my HA is failing. Hope it is just the SD card. Updates basically get stuck, and today it just full on stopped. Pi itself keeps running.
It seems Pi’s are harder to find atm then a Playstation 5. So if a backup can also be restored on other hardware, would be good to know. Can it or would I have to start again?
Yes, you can restore any HAOS backup on any other HAOS or supervised installation on any hardware.
My personal recommendation is getting an old PC and run either debian with supervised, Ubuntu server with HAOS vm or run HAOS natively on it. Getting a normal PC is easier to upgrade and you can let your server do more things without creating HAOS add-ons by youself
I’m also upgrading from a Pi (at two homes) and placed an order for two PoE Yellows. I am also impatient like you, so what I did was order two Pi CM4 modules (4GB RAM / 32GB emmc) and transfer my HA instances to these. Right now I am running the modules in an IO enclosure, but the plan is that when the Yellow ships, all I have to do is pop out the modules and put them in the Yellow. I’m not currently running any Z-wave or Zigbee directly from HA, but likewise I could also run a Z-Pi 7 or a RaZberry out of the IO board and swap that over to the Yellow (hopefully).
I probably should order one also. For now I have upgraded to an ssd. Didn’t solve all problems, but overall good speed boost. May do something similar and have a stopgap solution. Or go for other hardware.
What I do like about the Pi is its low power usage. Should compare what other devices use.