I am trying to switch from Raspberry pi4 to a MiniPC, but really i am not so expert about hardware, so which is, following your experience, the best MiniPC in commerce to usa with HA?
Thanks in advance to eveeryone who will help me…
I use an old dell 5400 laptop…works fine.
I use 15YO PC’s. As long as they have UEFI they are good. And if it’s older than that, like one of mine, you can install using a VM.
There’s loads of threads on this topic. Any one within reasonable specs should work perfectly. I have a 2016 model Intel NUC that works perfectly fine running Proxmox with a HAOS vm. Find one with decent storage, a non-celeron CPU and enough RAM.
The best will be one that suits your personal needs. And that differs per person.
I went with the Beelink EQ14 after the EQ 12 and 13 were often recommended. I run it as HAOS device.
But since the AI scam caused RAM and storage the price has risen.
Most bang for your buck… Dell Wyse 5010. ~$20 USD on eBay. Upgrade RAM to Corsair 8GB DDR3, another ~$20 on eBay. Get a male to female SATA cable and replace HD with SSD. Solid machine. Only downfall is the processor is older, doesn’t support AVX, doesn’t transcode to modern specs when using Music Assistant.
Personally, I use an i7-7700T Lenovo ThinkCentre M710q 16/512 because I am a power user. It is great - super snappy and powerful enough for BirdNET-Go GPU acceleration.
However, just about anything made in the past 10 years will be plenty. It really depends on whether you want to run Jellyfin/Plex/BirdNET/other heavy apps in addition to Home Assistant itself.
I am very happy with this.
Go on eBay (now there are a lot of refurbished Win10 MiniPCs for cheap), and find a MiniPC that has a reasonable price for you(starting at about 50-60 EUR, but you can find even for 200eur), has at least an Intel 6th-generation CPU, at least 8 GB RAM, ideally with a power adapter included.
And I recommend an SSD, not an HDD.
I use a Mac Mini these days but it hosts loads of additional services that you probably aren’t looking for. So I’d actually flip the question back to you: Why do you think you need more than a Pi and what other things would you want to use this mini PC for?
If it’s just for HA? Literally any device will do just fine. If you want to run additional services, I’d say start thinking about what that might look like and build out based on that. HA runs quite happily in a VM so you can do anything from a Mac Mini to a fully custom server running Proxmox. It really depends on what you want to do, what your current infrastructure looks like, budget, etc.
Yes, just piping in to say I also have a mini PC, Intel NUC. I purchased mine from eBay for under $200.
I had a Yellow Box with a RPi 4. It was not enough for my growing setup and the Beelink Mini PC was the solution.
I use an Intel NUC5i7RYH in a Akasa passive case to keep it silent, its running a W11 host install but I have HA in a virtualbox instance on that for ease of backup etc.
Been wanting to swap it over to a full proxmox setup but been too lazy to do the migration and setup lol.
I have been using an HP T630, with 16gb ram and 250gb ssd, for about 4 years. Running proxmox with pihole and openmediavault alongside HA in a vm. Runs faultlessly, only reason it ever gets rebooted is a power cut.
Thanks everyone for the replies. What are the minimum specifications a mini-PC dedicated exclusively to HA needs to have?
It needs to meet or exceed the specs of a Pi3/4 and or the HA Green in terms of min specs, after that its adding on any coordinators that you need for the device types you want in your setup.
Higher specced setups are there for added functions or services you want to host with HA on the same device.
If buying something it is best to be honest with yourself about what you want now, and what you may want in the future.
Think about how many devices you may want. How many integrations not related to devices, but most importantly the stuff that uses a lot of resource, media servers, cameras, ai or whatever. No point buying a device capable of running HA and 50 devices if as soon as you get it you want to run frigate with 10 cameras, and a local AI llm.
I use an HP 400 G9 MINI PC i5-12500T running VMware desktop and Home Assistant as one of the VMs
Lets be honest in IT what we want now and what we want in the future all depends on if we can afford it or not lol; that and what we want in the future usually is what businesses have now when they do upgrades.
In the end, I went with this MiniPC. What do you think?
Beelink Mini PC, Intel Alder Lake N95 processor (up to 3.40 GHz), MINI S12 Mini Computer, 8GB RAM 256GB SSD Business Mini Desktop PC, Dual HDMI/WiFi 5/BT 4.2/RJ45/WOL/2.5G LAN