HA hardware swlection

Installation
1

Hi, I started HA two months ago on the top of hubitat (used now as zigbee and zwave hub). Due to the fact that I was testing the waters I borrowed a Raspberry PI 4 from a friend.
Now is love HA and I want to build my own. Not sure what is the best hardware to be future proof, the PI4 with SD card is doing an amazing job. The options are

1- Raspberry PI4 with SSD (approx $200)

2- Odroid with SD (eMMC is expensive due to supply shortage) (approx $180)

3- NUC (approx $150 Amazon.com)

4- repurpose my Blue Iris desktop and add HA to it ($0)

Your advice is highly appreciated

2

I’d recommend the NUC route. The only downside is a slightly higher power consumption.

On the plus side is the lower up front cost and loads of processing power.

3

The model attached will be sufficient?

4

I would expect so.

Personally I got a micro PC from eBay. Loads of power for little cost.

5

I’m running a quiet big HA install on a dualcore intel system and use about 10% of the processor power. Yes, you will be way more, than safe with that one. :wink:

6

Hello,
my setup is a HP Prodesk 400 G4 (32Gb RAM) running HA in Virtualbox with 2 cores and 8Gb RAM. It consumes about 4W when HA is running and I can do pretty much anything else on it too. It is small enough to be hidden behind a cabinet.
Mario.

7

It’s hard to go past $0. And without knowing what “Blue Iris” is, “desktop” probably outperforms all the others.

HA doesn’t need much processing power to run, but you need to consider what other add-ons you’re going to install. For example Frigate, Deepstack, etc would need more grunt.

1 Like
8

Hi, thanks for $0 advice :blush:. The desktop I run blueiris is i5 6500 HP 3.2 ghz Amazon.com

My only concern is that I have to dedicate resources for the VM to run in parallel with windows which may impact the performance for both. I use deep stack with blueiris so no need to have in HA. Also my assumption is that the NUC will run on HA OS not as a VM which will eliminate the dependency of windows updates/ restarts. No sure if this is a dimension which has to be considered or not as HA also requires updates and restarts specially recently

9

Your concern about Windows updates is real - I moved from Windows to Ubuntu because sometimes HA would not start because it didn’t log me in. However, I think this is only a problem if a different user was logged in last, as with “fast window switching” it will pre-login the previous user. If this was your HA Windows login, all good. You have to jump through some hoops to auto-start the HA VM too.

I wouldn’t worry about your desktop performance - I use a desktop from 2012 with VirtualBox running HA, deepstack, Plex, three minecraft servers (and more) and the CPU rarely gets beyond 20%. The main concern with VMs is having enough memory - I have 32GB but the main hog is minecraft.

10

i use RPI 4 for 2 years but have some performance problems with frigate addon(7 HD Streams). I switch to this Lenovo M710q MT-M 10MQ-S0JU00 i7-7700T / 256GB / 16GB RAM.
Its a small PC and you can buy it used on ebay for less then 200€