I think that Ha is getting enough complex to deserve good hardware. Expensive? I have seen home automation systems for 50000 $.
I have sometimes the same kind of problem with a piā¦the sd card failed. But i donāt think itās necessary to use a nuc for ha. The pi is i think perfect but maybe the best solution should be to use a load balancing system with 2 pi. When there is a problem with oneā¦automatically switch to the second.
If you want to stick with a rPI Iād try an industrial SD card. It will cost more but they are rated for much higher write cycles as they use SLC flash. See this page:
We have industrial machines that have been running for years off similar cards; in fairly write heavy environments without problems.
But they are expensive; even the smaller 4GB SLC cards are pricey.
Remember SD cards are not the same as SSD drives - they typically have much reduced controllers that donāt do the fancy wear leveling that you get on consumer SSDās. The consumer ones are made to write photos or music which are large files; that get written once and read many many times.
I have a raspberry pi running for 1.5 years without any problems.
SD card corruption is ofcourse bad luck.
Sometimes it is the bad SD card, sometimes even the raspberry pi is faulty.
Had a bad raspberry pi which only could run for a few hours. Replaced it and now it works like a charm.
Nonetheless I did upgrade from my raspberry pi.
Already have a HP Proliant Microserver 7.Gen N54L running and did move hassio to this machine.
This way home assistant is way faster.
The raspberry pi can be a reliable hardware but offcourse you can not compare it with hardware like servers which are made for 24/7.
Hereās a more detailed version of what I wrote in my previous post.
https://wiki.embeddedarm.com/wiki/TS-43xx_best_practices_SD_cards
1 Like
An āoldā laptop, linux, HA and docker is the cheap solution i use. Really stable!
And built in ups if the battery still holds charge.
I built myself a custom setup with the raspi, a 5.5V battery and a adafruit powerboost 1000C.
Itās working for over a year now without a problem (except ones I create myself by doing stupid stuff).
I had been running HASSio on a Rpi for over a year. It was a small pain for me as the area I live in suffers frequent power outages.and subsequently the sd card always needed repair. I tried to medagate with tips from other users. However it was still a pain.
I remembered I had a old zotac ION-330 Mag that was collecting dust (it was a old MythTV frontend that had been replaced) I installed a linux OS and Docker then the Hassio stack. It runs beautifully, and power outages are trivial to recover from afterwards. And its using less then 3 watts of power.
And as a bonus I can now combine a few of the Rpi servers I had running. Hyperion, IPXE/DHCP and a small samba server, Iāll figure out more to run on it as it has the CPU power to do so.
Itās faster, has a proper HDD that can handle frequent database writes and now enables me to have hundreds, possibly thousands of days of history in the database.
Just thought I would share my 2 cents.
I used a Raspberry Pi. This was my favourite configuration that was built after many iterations trying to solve what many others have mentioned here and trying to keep my budget low:
- To deal with the common power failures at my place I used a cheap APC UPS with USB port. My HASS deployments always had trouble restarting when in presence of Chromecasts devices that made it unreliable.
- To ease dealing with the reconfiguration of HASS, I used its Docker distribution. The host was OpenMediaVault on Debian for ARM which has an extension to manage Docker. I choose the use of OMV because those guys have done a great job providing a well executed user interface to manage the system.
- To ease the SD card wearing, OpenMediaVault also uses Log2ram getting the benefits that mentioned @123 in a previous post. Also, I used a folder on the hard disk attached to the Pi as the volume for HASS data. So the constant writing on the database is not done to the SD card.
Hope this helps
1 Like
Weāve seen a number of theories in here but the frequent theme here is power. It is already fairly well established the Piās have some strenuous power requirements. Just because there is a micro-USB connector that power comes from, doesnāt mean you can just plug a pi into a computer USB port or an AC USB charger. I have various Piās in various roles throughout my network (3D printer, Rasplex, sensors/relays, cameras, etc). I suffered frequently with corrupt filesystem issues, even without power failures in the home. One minute a Pi is working fine, the next, not. Eventually, I got sick of rebuilding my SD cards and buying new SD cards, etc. I even tried an industrial SD card to no avail. I know the issue is not ānumber of writesā because sometimes an SD card would become corrupt within a couple of weeks of being installed on Rasplex which does no significant writes to the local filesystem (even /var/log is a tmpfs).
After googling, I found a lot of blogs that talk about SD card corruption on Piās with poor power supplies. I dove in and bought some official Raspberry Pi power bricks and installed them on my various piās. Iām even re-using some SD cards that had previously become corrupt. Iāve had no SD card corruption issues in the past year even through a number of power failures.
The Pi even nicely tells you whether itās under-voltage. Hereās a Pi running off 2A USB charger:
user@raspberrypi:~ $ vcgencmd get_throttled
throttled=0x50005
Hereās a Pi running off an official Pi power supply:
root@octopi:/home/pi# vcgencmd get_throttled
throttled=0x0
In my case, I use HomeAssistant to automate/monitor/report the various systems at our remote cabin. I view the installation as mission critical and so I do not run it on a Raspberry Pi. I have a Proxmox Cluster and run HomeAssistant in a VM with a big APC ups. I have very long uptimes.
My Hassio was a bit unstable, I culled a few addons that I wasnāt using much anyway, and stability has improved significantly.
Put on a real pc I did and it was the best thing I ever did faster restart to got a cheap one for 100 4gig ram 500 hard drive over kill but it fast
Okey. So 9 days in the system broke again. It was working after last config and backup. The sd-card is the best I can get a hold on around here, a SanDisk.
Haha. I quit!
Sounds more like a power supply problem.
So i have searched the internet for a rugged power supply and found this:
It is 5V and up to 3A. Pricing here in norway is about 54 euro. I think it seems solid keeping in mind it is much bigger than an regular adapter and since it can supply 3A the pi will not be able to stress itā¦ thoughts? Overkill? If there is any other norwegians here with a solid system i could use some recommendations.
When I was using a Pi I had a 3amp power supply. Always seemed like false economy to use the bare minimum. I never had any issues.
Would you advise that even over the factory RPi supplied one? Canāt say Iāve ever come across power issues, but might well be I didnāt recognize issues as being power relatedā¦
Not necessarily. One of my Pi3Bās was a RPi one. But my other Pi I got a power supply on eBay. I think it depends as well on whatever you hang off it. I do think that overspecifying the current capacity never hurts though.
thx, will consider that the upgrading, never be short of steady power. just like my power amps in the auditorium ā¦ 
1 Like