I am switching from smartthings to HA. I am currently using a RPi 3B+ it was enough for me to get a feel for HA and decide i wanted to proceed with it, but it keeps crashing on me. Based on the advice on this forum I want to upgrade to a NUC instead of a Pi4.
I hate to be the guy to post another “what nuc to buy?” post… instead i’ll ask the question are there any “gotchas” that will prevent this NUC from being a good HA dedicated machine? Based on my knowledge these specs look adequate, but i am a NOOB when it comes to pc hardware.
Intel NUC 12 Pro Mini PC Kit
NUC12WSHi5
Core i5-1240P 1.70GHz
16GB RAM
512GB SSD
Windows 11Pro
I will have about 60 devices (mostly zwave and zigbee), i integrated my Rivian, a fair amount of simple automations, and i love collecting data so i want to be able to go back and look at switch states, battery levels, temperatures etc. and who knows what else…
CPU is around 7 times faster than what I run, my only reservation would be about power consumption but the TDP on the chip is a reasonable 28W … I generally aim for <10W for a 24/7 build but that’s just me
For the use case that you are describing, it will be overkill.
As my fellow HA user notes: if you will be using other cpu intensive tasks, you have headroom.
To give you an idea: I’m running HA in a container with 2 vCPU’s and 1GiB of RAM with 66 devices/540 entities.
CPU is an i5-6500 CPU @ 3.20GHz (4 core) and average usage is rarely above 1%, sometimes with spikes of 40-50%
No idea what quick sync is… or jellyfin but I’ll do some research!
Also my electricity is pretty cheap here at $0.11 per kWh… it works out to $1 per watt per year. So if this things uses 35W on average it’s only $35 for the year.
Ok so sounds like it has plenty of umph. I’ll buy it.
Since it has some overhead would you run proxmox or something instead of just HA OS or is it not that umphy?
Yup would definitely run a hypervisor like proxmox but would bump up to a minimum of 32gig of ram and get more storage for the stack of VMs that I’d run on it
Your use case may differ but I ensure that my hardware is well utilised (ehem no pun intended)
Personally I run ProxMox on an HP Elitedesk 800 G2 Mini i7-6700t 500gb SSD 16gb RAM
Have a VM running HA and one running AdGuard currently - though could run add’l if I chose to do so.
Personally, I love being able to backup the entire VM in ProxMox and if something goes awry during an upgrade in HA, I can just restore the entire container.
HA’s Backup restore process is good - but not nearly as good / easy as ProxMox’s - in my opinion anyhow.
I’m fairly novice and used YouTube tutorials to help me get it all up and running ‘correctly’.
I have used 16GB for quite some time.
Yes, Proxmox is a fun project and opens up a lot of possibilities to run services/systems virtually.
The ability to make snapshots and backups is also a big plus.
Using a NUC for many years now with Ha using zwave (66 devices) and zigbee (23 devices).
it is a reliable choice. Mine has also i5 cpu, which seems overkill. However If you want to run the nuc quitly, it helps, because the cpu temp stays low and the fan is very low most of the time. 16GB RAM is overkill. Mine has 8GB and uses max 40%. More ram means more heat in the nuc and there by higher cooling needs. Please, do not use Windows, unless you are going to use it as a desktop. I would advice to install Unbuntu tls or HA OS. I am runnung Ubuntu tls with docker. Created a docker compose for HA, MariaDB, mosquitto and zwavejs.
easy to maintain and backup and super reliable.
I am going to give Proxmox a try, I would like to start off with an an Adguard VM on the NUC with a secondary Adguard on the Pi (which will come available when I move HA to the NUC).
I am using the UniFi adblocker at the moment which is actually decent except the lack of a whitelist is driving me nuts.
