I have a few questions about the options I have. I’ve been googling for a few days, but can’t find all the answers. Especially the one about spinning down the harddrives in a Synology. Hopefully you’ll be able to help me.
I’ve been using HA on a raspberry pi 3B for a couple of months now. There is a Samsung galaxy tab 8.0 2019 connected to it which is hanging in the livingroom. My wife wanted to be able to view the camera in the babyroom, the problem is the stream takes very long to load and even when it is loaded, it’s usually fluent for a few seconds. So not really usable.
The other thing is every so often Supervisor doesn’t load. It gives the error can’t load the panel source: /api/hassio/app/entrypoint.js restarting HA doesn’t work. Unplugging the Pi and reboot the whole system does.
I really like HA, so I want to upgrade my hardware.
In my opinion I have a few options.
Cheapest is probably a Pi 4, with high endurance SD-card. But will it really solve above problems?
An Intel NUC (or other mini pc). I don’t mind a used one I can buy or ebay or something. But will a celeron be fast enough, or do I need a i3, i5 or i7 and what is the minimal generation?
Buying a NAS is on my wishlist for a long time. I’ve been reading about running HA, Pi-hole and so on in docker. I’m not familiar with docker yet, but I like a challenge .
I’ve been looking at either the Synology DS220+ or the DS720+. But I’m open to look at a Qnap alternative. I’ll be putting 2x 4TB in raid 1 in it for storage.
Is a NAS faster than a Pi 4?
Will the hard drives spindown (hibernate) when not accessing the nas? Or do I need to put more Ram or install HA on a USB drive then?
I hope you can help me make a good choice so I can experience the full power of HA and be somewhat future proof.
I have experience with all the 3 options.
In my opinion the nuc is the way to go with hassio.
The sd card in a pi will sooner or later die.
Using docker on a Synology will work with the core version of home assistant. Some people make it possible to run hassio on a synology but that is more work and needs more maintenance.
From what I could find it should be possible to run the full HA in docker. But I’ve read about the Core version too. I’m not really into Linux so far, but I’m not afraid of a challenge.
I think I’ll go with either the NUC or a NAS. But in the case of a NUC, which processor? And then Linux, and HA in docker? Or a different setup?
Please stop using the term hass.io. It no longer exists. It’s continued use only muddies the waters of an already confusing landscape of names.
@TimT86 I would suggest against using a Synology NAS, unless you already had one. There is better hardware to use for far less of a cost. Don’t get me wrong, I have owned a few of them, they are great, but running HA on them can be a little finicky.
The cost of a DS720+ here is Aussie land (not sure where you are located) is $800, which buys you a Quad core Celeron CPU and 2gb RAM. You could purchase a NUC10 with an i5 for about $500, build yourself a SFF PC with better specs, of even better, get a good quality used 1-2 generation old workstation off eBay for very cheap. (see post here for an idea).
Installation wise, you have a few options depending on the hardware you choose. On a NUC, you can run HA OS (if you purchase a supported NUC), Supervised, Core or VMs. There are advantages and disadvantages to all depending on your use case. If you go with a NUC and HA OS, you do lose ability to take full advantage of the NUCs power as the OS is very minimal and you are largely stuck within the HA ecosystem for add-ons.
If you build you own PC, or use a used workstation, you can’t run HA OS natively, but, you can run Supervised, Core or VMs. This would be my recommended method if you are planning to use the machine as a media streamer and for file storage as well as HA. Proxmox is a great option, you can install HA OS in a VM and run a number of other VMs to do everything else you way want to do like Plex, DVR, Samba file sharing etc.
I’ll leave it there, ask questions if you would like some more info.
I’m not saying you should get a NAS, but if you do go the NAS route, even a 4-5 year old NAS is more than capable with just a memory upgrade. I had the NAS before I got into HA, that’s why I went the docker route.
My NAS runs HA, MQTT, ESPHome, PiHole, and many other dockers just fine. with everything running full-tilt and watching TV or a movie on Kodi (RPi 3) the CPU usage rarely goes above 40% and memory usage hovers between 50-60% of 8GB. The only time I have problems is when someone opens a connection to Plex and it eats memory and CPU time. I disabled HDD hibernation and disabled sleep because with all of the services running, it never slept anyway. My only experience with an RPi is running Kodi (LibreELEC) so I can’t speak on the performance comparison, but my guess is yes, a NAS will be faster than an RPi 4.
I like having everything centrally controlled/configured. I don’t like having multiple devices when one device can handle it all. To be honest though, if I had to do it over, I’d get a real server and run VMs or Proxmox and have a SAN or external disk array.
My nuc has a i3-7300 intel processor. Last week i upgrade the memory to 16GB because i’m testing with tensorflow.
I choose for hassos, the reason for hassos is because it is very stable and less maintance and it is so easy to use add-ons. If you would like to go for linux with docker or something, just ask yourself what you want to do with it. I can do everything i want with hassos, but if thats not enough for you choose something else.
Another thing, when I used the nas in combination with a zwave usb stick I had problems every time after a restart. The USB stick was not properly recognized by docker, or you had to connect it manually again.
Your set up looks very professional! Do you run HA supervised in a docker or the Core version?
I’ve been reading up about VM vs docker including LXC containers on Linux in Proxmox. Not sure what to choose.
This looks like something my setup would be like. Maybe i’ll use the NUC7 Celeron J4005, because is cheaper.
I don’t want to loose the ability to do something else with it in the future. So are all the addons working the same as running them in separate containers?
I run Home Assistant Container (core in a docker container). Learning docker wasn’t hard because all of my containers I run had docker run examples. I just had to tweak it a little so it would work for my setup such as changing volume paths.
Because I’m not really familiar with running different dockers I build a test machine.
I just my own laptop (i5-6500t, 8GB) and made a partition on the SSD to install Ubuntu. I’m going to install HA and test it for a while before buying new hardware. I have a laptop from work which I pretty much use all the time. So I can do without my personal laptop for a few weeks just for testing.
So it’s better to run a VM if I’m going to use Proxmox?
Would I use the VDMK or the QCOW2? Or any of the other images? What’s the difference by the way?
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