ok… if there’s already a Synology available, I would also consider this as one of the best options…
In my case, my Server has replaced the previous synology due to the amount of disks I needed…
So - yes, adding HA as a virutal environment would be the logical option in terms of your requirements:
Low power consumption is really important. Not only because of costs, but also to minimize CO2 emissions.
It would probably just add a small amount of additional usage to the Synology, but would save an additional device at the end
There are a lot of factors to cosider when picking. But since you ask for opininon, here is mine. Just buy any old pc, preferably with 4+ gb ram and i3 or better CPU. I have 2 rasppbery pi 3, one pi 4 8g, but it then I decided to get a HG 800 g1 for ~130 EUR. Personally, I run multiple VMs on it and HA is just one of them, but this gives you a lot more opportunities, is a lot more powerful and stable and is probably cheaper right now than a RPI.
I run hassos on a pi4 with 1 GB of ram, and a 128G ssd. once I wrote a script to add a few GB of swap at startup it ran great, no perceptible lag at all. Of course I wish I had more ram but where you gonna buy a pi4 these days? the point is it doesnt take a lot of computer to run HA.
Ive just got into the whole home assistant thing since i found out the oem provider of my zigbee kit has given up…the service is still running but im not sure for how long though…i was using a RP4 8gb and another RP4 8gb for Pi hole but have decided to run them (and probably other VMs on a Dell 3050 i5 ultra small form factor pc - its not turned up yet so im using an old i7 4th gen passively cooled mini pc as a test bed…while everything is running ok ive yet to get any ZigBee devices paired up!..
I’ve been burned by QNAP too many times to reccomend putting anything other than files on one of their NAS’s. They drop support for core applications at a moments notice, and you end up having to shift the app to a PC / Pi anyway. If you go for a PC or a Pi the hardware can be replaced if it fails, but when QNAP pull support for an app, there’s nowhere left to go.
I’m not saying they WILL pull support, but complaining to them goes unanswered. I bought a QNAP NAS with built in HDMI to run a Kodi instance, and Minim server to stream my music to my smart speakers. Both of these have been dropped. Kodi was moved back to a Pi, and the NAS is stuck on the last firmware that supported Minim server, because if I upgrade it will stop working.
I have three QNAP NAS that I’ve had for many years (853Pro, 863 and 1282T) and all though I do not have them connected to media players, I’ve never experienced them dropping support for software I use (Plex, Container station, backup). As long as you can run containers on the NAS I wouldn’t worry about this.
As the poster of the original question, I thought it’d be nice to let y’all know what solution I chose in the end, and how I landed there.
As mentioned before, I do have a Synology DS920+ running. It’s a very nice and capable machine. In terms of minimizing electricity usage, it would probably the best choice to run HA on that one. I actually tried to achieve just that, but it was painful and problematic. Even if you run HA in Docker, the underlying OS (DSM in the case of Synology) needs to support the extra hardware. In my case, I needed to connect a Zigbee USB Dongle and a USB interface to read out my electricity meter.
Apart from storage devices, modern versions of Synology’s DSM don’t support any USB peripherals. There is a guide from Marius Hosting on how to install external device drivers, but I didn’t succeed in getting a working solution. Also, I figured that I wouldn’t want my home automation to depend on an unsupported way of installing device drivers. I’d have to re-install the drivers after every OS update, and there would still be a chance that the update would break the setup…
So, that means I needed dedicated hardware. I considered Home Assistant Yellow. But at the time I needed the hardware, it was not in stock, and –to be honest– I didn’t think it was a very compelling deal, even if it would have been available.
Raspberry Pies were also difficult to order at that time. Plus, I didn’t hear good stories about the performance of RPi 4 when used fanless.
So I looked into Odroid and I found the ODROID N2+ would give me more than enough performance at a decent price. Odroid.nl has a nice Home Assistant “Build Your Own” Bundle that comes pre-assembled in a nice housing and with Home Assistant pre-installed. (I believe that it’s basically the same bundle that was sold as “Home Assistant Blue” a couple of years ago, but without the HA logo printed on it.) That’s the one I ended up buying. Installation was a breeze, because HA was already installed. I only needed to walk through the setup screens and update to the latest version. It’s been running flawlessly for the last couple of months.
