HAss Green and external USB SSD

Installation
1

Hi

Just got my first HAss up and running on a Home Assistant Green.

After adding my existing zigbee2MQTT devices I noticed that the internal 32GB drive was 15% full on Day 2 of the install.

SO bought a 1TB USB SSD and plugged Iit in and HAss reports that no suitable external device found. The external data disk must be larger than the storage capacity of the existing disk

Anyone any ideas on how to get HAss to recognise that 1TB is more than 32GB ?

The Crucial USB SSD is showing up nicely on other devices.

I have tried lightening the load by adding Network storage but that does not appear to work either.

Is it possible this is just a damaged HAss Green?

2

Unfortunately I don’t have helpful info for you but I’m about to help someone set up their first system. Was thinking about doing a HAGreen system with an external drive for a pretty barebones Frigate setup but it’s unclear to me if that will work.

Can I ask where you are seeing USB devices within HASS at all?

3

I left the 1TB drive plugged din all night and have been out all day.

Just checked and Green found the 1TB drive, I selected it then nothing.

Clicked on Move Data Drive again and it reports ‘Failed to get available hardware 3’

OK

Still trying to get it to work.

4

So last night I set up a VM to run some tests. I assumed that HA Green is running HAOS but I don’t know that for sure. I managed to get an external USB attached and available in Media. What I found is that HAOS doesn’t have root access normally so you can’t just mount stuff. Which I have some pretty strong opinions on but we can skip that.

Follow the steps in the solution of this post:

What they don’t mention is that HAOS will not accept the drive if it is NTFS OR exFAT formats (you know - the only formats easily available to you on windows). What does work is the linux format ext4 which unfortunately means you can’t easily view it in windows either. This is probably why you are having issues.

If you don’t have access to a linux machine in order to format your external drive you can actually format it through your home assistant but you will need root access. You can follow this video to get root access going (ignore the mounting of drives and whatnot as the previous link is better imo). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHvBzX41-Ag

Once you have shell access you can run this linux command to format your drive through the home assistant shell: How to Format Disk Partitions in Linux {ext4, NTFS and FAT32}

5

Its Ok the Hass Green can no longer be accessed even after a few hard reboots :slight_smile:

So finished that experiment :slight_smile:

6

It was pretty quickly clear that the HASS Green was not going to work, with no way to get backups off it, it had a very limited lifespan and the 32GB drive was filling up alarmingly quickly and so was the etc lifespan.

It ran for nearly 3 days before dying.

Managed to restore to factory and started the return process.

I will try again by putting it on a VM so it will have access to bigger drives and hopefully support backups.

Neither backup to external USB or SMB worked as neither could be mounted.

7

Did you try formating the external drive as ext4?

8

No it was raw as delivered.

Not a problem anymore.

Having tested the Green it gave me insight into Hass and I really like it so put it on a VM on Mac mini M1 so I can give it a lot more horse power so I can run MQTT Broker, Node Red and zigbee2MQTT all on it and be managed by Hass.