Hi, I’d like to transfer my current hassio system over from my rpi3+, mostly for speed, a real gigabit LAN, and usb 3.0.
I’ve considered the odroid-n2 for the price/performance but I’m not sure about current and future support for hassio.
What problems might I run into with this setup, and are there other HW options I should consider? (I honestly got lost in the whole compatibility thing with Linux. Is the issue the Linux OS image that needs to be compiled for the specific cpu core architecture, or specifically for the entire HW setup? Or maybe the Hass.io image that needs to support the specific cpu?)
I’ll be running docker with hassio and probably a couple other containers, and my next best option is to go all out on an i7-8550U mini pc (cheaper and better than NUC for me), but the price difference over the SBCs is steep and I’m not sure it’s worth it for my uses.
I use an Odroid XU4 running DietPi, and I’m very happy with it.
I would have used Hassio, but it didn’t seem to like using the eMMC cards on a XU4. It runs fine on it if using an SD card - though it’s been 2 months since I last tried a Hassio image so maybe that’s changed. The eMMC card does give that bit of a speed boost, and avoids any issues of SD card corruption.
The XU4 isn’t taxed much by DietPi or HA, so there’s lots of scope for more services. I’ve Syncthing, Node-Red, Appdaemon, and a few other bits running on it. I use Syncthing to back up my laptop, Phone / Tablets etc. all while running HA and the others - and there’s no performance issues yet.
Here’s the htop on mine, if the eMMC / SD card issue is solved - I’ll probably use Hassio on the XU4 for the convenience. Though I’m not complaining now either.
Very nice, though I’m not sure if the fact that it’s working on the xu4 means a lot for the n2. I got lost in all the compatibility forum posts, but I’m guessing I would need everything to be compiled specifically for the n2.
I was actually hoping to run it from an ssd. It’s another reason why I want to migrate from the RaspberryPi
I think the random read times are much faster on an ssd, but I haven’t tested anything myself, I just know I wanna get as far away from the SD card solution as possible.
Why does it actually need to be specifically compiled for the device? Would compiling once for the cpu model work interchangeably on other HW with that cpu?
Do I have to rely on odroid for future Linux releases, or can I just use a generic Linux release?
Would you rather spend the extra 30-40$ for the H2 with the Intel celeron processor? From my understanding x86 cpu wouldn’t have compatibility issues like the arm based.
It should be here in 2/3 days, so I can let you know what I think of it. There’s a nearly done beta image of DietPi doing the rounds, so I’ll try that one out:
I think the specific compiling issues come from the varying combination of cpu & gpu between these boards, e.g XU4 vs N2 vs C2 - though I’m not 100% on that. In the odroid forum threads there are always community images doing the rounds! So no-one’s really stuck with a single image, and the posters are always helpful with builds.
Though the forum is a jumble there. I wish they’d move to Discourse, it’s beyond primitive how it is.
There is the Asus Tinkerboard S, which has 16gb eMMC included so you don’t have to worry about corrupting regular SD cards. Hassio is supported and is as easy to install and use as Raspberry Pi 3B. The main downside for me is the price is too high for the performance. I still find it too slow for the price I paid, though restart times are 2-3x shorter, and Lovelace is just slightly faster.
It cost me around $110 for the board, case and 3A power supply.
I just got myself an HP T620 Thin client with a quad core amd cpu.
It has sata, lots of usb 3 ports, pci-e and no fan. It’s x86 based, so it will run any distro you can run on your pc So far I’m pretty happy with it, but I need to do some more testing.
I have a couple t-series thin clients …can’t recall if it’s a 620 or other 6xx series. It has internal m.2 and mpci (that won’t take msata). Upgradable ram, and an internal USB port. One runs win10 as a jump box for network admin stuff. Runs great. Other runs rancherOS and container workloads. It is quite fast…
I moved off an Intel-based docker system to HassOS on XU4 and has been working great for me for the last 4 months. However, it requires a dev release of the image. I followed the advise from this issue thread: https://github.com/home-assistant/hassos/issues/134
I have an N2 and it is working great. Dockerized HA on an Odroid supplied Ubuntu emmc. I use the qemuarm-64-homeassistant image. I prefer not using Hassos currently, so not having an install for it does not bother me. The N2 replaced a C2, which I always found to be pretty sluggish running Hassos, so I ran DietPi with a venv install on it.
I am currently running Hass on a rpi3 from an SSD connected on USB. Running raspbian with Hass.io installed. Very happy with the stability improvements.
Do you mean you switched from a full Hass.io image to a Hass.io container under raspbian which then enabled you to run from ssd? In that case I’d really love to hear a more indepth review and possible some tips/guide because I couldn’t find any when I searched for that previously.
It has been working very stable so far. No more issue with corrupted home assistant installations and faster restarts/reloads of home assistant.
Minor issue: Sometimes I need to reset power after a reboot because something goes wrong during the boot, to fully boot the rpi. Since it is not really an issue for me I did not investigate this further. Might be because of my cheap SSD and/or USB to SATA cable.
Don’t forget to specify last command with machine (in my case raspberrypi3) curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/home-assistant/hassio-build/master/install/hassio_install | bash -s -- -m raspberrypi3
Hass.io should be installed after a couple of minutes
So a little later than I expeected, all is going well with the N2.
I used the DietPi Image and after just a little adjustment mentioned in the forums (details below) - it’s been plain sailing:
I reckon it’s not noticeably slower running HomeAssistant than the XU4 I was using, plus it’s completely silent. Runs cool.
Any little niggles I have are with my learning-curve & DietPi, I haven’t found the N2 lacking hardware-wise at all.
Copes very well with backing-up my phone, tablet, and the two laptops using Syncthing to an ssd continuously and the near-constant traffic that creates at the same time. Plus Gitea and a few other DietPi bits.
So no complaints, will be eager to see if a Pi4 with Hassio / or DietPi using an ssd is much competition. The N2 uses between 5 and 15% of the N2’s six cores on average, and ~470mg of the 4gb of memory - so plenty of room for other uses.
No regrets buying it
@ODINITE I’m using the same image, but I’ve set the branch to beta. Simply edit dietpi.txt file on your boot partition and set this variable from DEV_GITBRANCH=master to `DEV_GITBRANCH=beta
