About two years ago I migrated my Home Assistant stuff from a Raspberry Pi 3 to an Intel NUC i3.
The difference is absolutely amazing. An HA restart takes 15-seconds, a Node Red deploy takes maybe 5-seconds. With a 2Tb SSD I never have to worry about the history database filling up. Best of all I don’t have any more MicroSD card failures.
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I am also running HA OS bare-metal on a NUC, but if I were to start from scratch right now I reckon a better choice would be a refurbished corporate SFF, for one main reason: the fan.
Both NUCs and laptops use dinky, non-standard fans that I don’t think are meant for years of 24/7 usage and already on 2 separate NUCs I’ve had fan failures.
While on (at least some) laptops fans are relatively reasonable to replace, extracting the motherboard from an all-aluminum (and thus not flexible) NUC was a major PITA for me, whereas on any OptiPlex or whatever you have thousands of machines and many resellers that can get you any part you want. The power draw difference between a NUC and a SFF machine is not too big from what I’ve seen, but easy, cheap repairability is a huge plus imo.
Just for HA a fanless SBC is a good choice, but if tempted to add other self-hosted stuff, the power and flexibility of a refurbished SFF with various ports, slots & stuff can’t be beat.
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HP T630 Thin Client, fanless, noiseless… That is my choice. Unfortunatelly it uses only M2 SATA, not NVMe, but has DDR4 memory on the other hand. It has plenty USB ports as well for any adapters. For less than a 100USD you can find some bundle with WiFi/Bluetooth card as well. Just make sure to get it with an original power adapter.
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Energy consumption is another very important factor to consider for a device that is on 24/7. Based on this criterium alone, an old laptop or desktop would be a no-go for me. But in the end that is a personal choice.
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Hm… Can you help me out doing the math? My closed Thinkpad 460s (where I run my HA) connected via ethernet draws about 8W (the fan is off all the time). That’s like 70kWh, roughly 12€/year. RPi 4 draws 4-5 wats, so it’s about a half. I don’t know man - if you don’t live under 1$/day, it’s quite unlikely to make a difference, no? It’s literally a difference of having 2 fewer coffees (replace by your favorite beverage) in a year. If it’s emissions, 200 km in a fairly efficient car is something like 22 kg CO2, which is equivalent to that ~70kWh. E.g. a fridge eats at least 5-10 times more than that.
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I also went with this option in the end. For just 100$ (after a few days of monitoring a local second-hand online shop), I was able to get Thinkpad 460s with 8GB RAM, i5-4300U @ 1.9GHz (2.9 GHz boost), 256 GB SSD, “built-in” UPS, “physical terminal” (you can just open it and work directly without having to connect from elsewhere - even though that’s of course also trivially possible), can be used for other things or as a backup laptop when needed… I run HA in Qemu, so I have all the nice goodies of supervised installation.
Really, the only drawback I can think of is the size (but I suspect that’s not an issue for many).
Nice, that is very low power usage indeed! And the battery inside will act as a UPS. Actually sounds like a good solution.
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The only caveat I would make is that second hand laptops often have batteries that don’t have much life in them - it’s the first thing to go in a laptop. Replacements are often cheap though, and they’ll still give you some time to shut down gracefully.
Old Laptop !, as mentioned above build in ups + Bluetooth, keyboard and monitor, powerful cpu, and sufficient ram for the future, all powered by 1power-supply which have no problems to power 1 SSD + 2 mSata
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Im currently running Hass on a Protectli Vault 2 Port Its been solid rig, should be for a good while.
There are many many similar boxes on Aliexpress.
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Yes, but depending on where its shipping to Aliexpress can be a very long wait with the current situations. Protectli is fairly local to me with product support for the hardware. Just another option for people. I got one before pandemic for pfsense build, went another way with it had it sitting around.
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I have a circa 2016 Mac Air with 8gb that’s never going to get used… has anyone used a Mac for HA? I also have a couple ZBox mini PCs with i3, 8gb that I could repurpose with a fat SSD. The Mac would be nice because it has a screen and good battery… the mini PCs are probably easier. THoughts?
The delay from China is almost always in U.S. Customs.
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To digress a little bit. I would not disagree completely 🤷, but working for a railroad that services the Port Newark elizabeth marine terminal area NJ/NY freight and passanger. There is alot of West coast ships now being diverted to East coast Ports to be hauled west via air, and rail. I’m confident customs is just a tiny bit of the bottle neck atm. Thus my notation of “current situations”.
It would be nice to have some affiliate links for users outside the US that want to support you while simultaneously upgrading or buying (much needed) stuff.
You can actually run HA (from the full HA OS to Docker containers, etc.) on anything back to a Raspberry Pi 1. Do note that the RPi 1 and Zero are no longer supported as of HA 7.0. You must install HA 6.6 for those.
You can get any release of HA OS from their GitHub Releases:
And if you want to jump right to 6.6:
Just expand the Assets at the bottom of each release box and download the version you need (although really, 7 is the best option for now… until 8 is released, of course!)
Honestly any user will be disillusioned by a pi1 or zero.
I can’t believe what you guys pay in electricity over there. I line in the ny Metro area and pay $0.30 per KW/h
$0.30?!?!? Only $0.11355 here in San Antonio. I will never complain about my electric bill ever again!!! LOL
edit: And we just had a 3.85% rate hike go into effect.