Hi everyone first time poster here. So please excuse my ignorance.
I am moving house soon and when I do I would like to base my smart home around home assistant.
As well as your normal basic smart home items such as smart switches ect I would like to have a minimum of three external ip cameras, be able to store my photos and videos capture by my mobile phone locally at home and have use of a windows operating system for general office based task.
My question is do I get sepperate pieces of hardware for each. For example home assistant green/yellow, nvr, nas drive, and mini pc?
Or do a get a more capable pc with 3x hdd/sdds and run haos as a vm?
It depends. A bigger (as in having the resources of the 3 different devices) single machine is better at allocating resources. If you have spikes in usage of one feature (eg ram usage while uploading photos) the other can get a little laggy but you’ll finish all your tasks whereas a separate device can lead you to reach some
limit. Also virtualization helps in many supporting tasks as backup even bare metal, snapshots pre-upgrade and so on.
The downsides in my view are: if you collapse all the features on a single device if one of the features became resource hungry it will impact the others; another important issue are fpower consumptions. HA (and the NAS BTW) should be up 24x7, so a powerful machine always on will suck more power that a smaller.
I would choose a single system for nas and ha. If possible with the budget a x86 nas that supports virtualization.