I’ll be moving to a new house next year. A good moment to start with a fresh install of HA on new hardware. What’s the best hardware to run HA on these days? I have been running HA on a Raspberry Pi 2 for years now. It’s still running fine, although it is noticeable that this is not the fastest hardware around.
I have the following requirements:
Low energy usage
Passive cooling
Good performance (good is good enough, anything that is faster than RPi 2 will be fine, I guess )
Wired Ethernet (will be installed close to internet modem and switch)
The example you link to is an Intel-based machine. Don’t you expect compatibility problems? It seems to me that most HA installs use Arm64 architecture hardware, like the Raspberry family.
What’s best for me, might not be the best for you.
A used HP Prodesk G4 mini was the best solution for me :-). This will cost you perhaps 200€ used. Ok no passive cooling, but it is barely recognizable, idle power is ~4-5W with i5-8500 CPU.
According to this graph and your opinion there must be a rain of complaints about compatibility…
But there is not.
HA is super-stable on intel, maybe even more stable, than on Arm.
I do use passive cooled intel based SFF PC from Shuttle. Designed to run 24/7. That was a gold shot. The love between this machine and HA is there…
As a pure python app, HA itself is about as platform agnostic as is possible. I can’t imagine x86 HAOS support being dropped, I doubt the community would allow it.
ARM’s historical advantage for HA has been price more than anything else. That price advantage can start to evaporate if you want a fully configured system with more ram, a case, power supply and (non-USB) ssd capability.
The ARM SBCs still generally have a power advantage, the importance of which can vary based on theology and local costs.
To be prepared for the future i took a nuc (8th gen) and a passive case for it (something like this ). It not the smallest one (and you will loose wifi), but it’s absolutely silent and does it’s work.
Before 2022.11 it was about 3W, now it’s about 5W. But it’s not the cheapest solution.
I can confirm - HA (in my case HA:OS) is running fine on my intel based machine
You have pretty clear requirements (fanless, low energy profile, etc.)
But my recommendation would be, to cross check, what else might come in the near future.
I’ve decided to build a small “home Server” - which is able to run other Systems as well (virtualized / containers) - rather than setting up several “Pies” or other small hardware for the different tasks.
So I can “somehow” combine a storage, smarthome (HomeAssistant), my HomeMatic CCU, Media Server etc. in one machine… sure… It does require more energy - but I don’t know if running 5 or more Rasspberry Pies + NAS, or whatever else is really saving that much energy ^^
So - just consider upgrade options for the (near) future - especially, when you do have the options to plan network and so
I own RPi zero W, Rpi 3, Rpi 4, Odroid-xu4 and Odroid-C4 and the C4 is my favorite by far. I think raspberry pi is overrated. It is like the arduino of the microcomputers. Ubiquitous because they were the first in their market but nowadays bad relation quality/price.
Personally, I’d like my setup to be as simple as possible. The less moving parts, the less potential errors…
So for running “just” HA in the preferred “supervised” setup, I guess a RPi4 or Odroid C4 is good enough. And probably offers the most easy and straightforward installation and maintenance.
Good question! I don’t have good experiences with running virtualized things on my NAS. I had the controller for my WiFi network running as a Docker container, but it was unstable. Since I switched to a dedicated hardware controller, the WiFi network is much more stable.
My UniFi Controller runs without issue in Docker. Containers you can download are not always official releases and might therefor lack in stability. That’s not necessarily the fault of Synology or Docker.
Mount the HA OS image in Virtual Macine Manager and test it. I never had any stability issues. Advantage is that you can automatically make snapshots and restore your whole setup if something goes wrong.
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