Home Assistant Green eMMC wear limits

[rdibley]

I’ve been thinking about getting a Home Assistant Green for a while, but I’m worried about the longevity of the non-removable eMMC storage. I recently experienced a failure of the onboard storage on an expensive router, so I’m apprehensive to follow suit with the Home Assistant Green.

1. Does anyone have experience with these failing, and how long did it run before failing?
2. Is there a simple way to understand which plugins or features would write too much to the eMMC?
3. Are there any guides to setting up Home Assistant with minimal writes?
4. Is there really any benefit to going with the Home Assistant Green, compared to other single board computers? (not Raspberry Pi) The Home Assistant Yellow came with Zigbee integrated onto the board, but the Green doesn’t seem to have anything that would distinguish itself from other single board computers, other than coming with Home Assistant pre-installed.

Thanks.

Ryan

[paulbates]

Hi Ryan & welcome!
I am relatively new to HA, just started in January. I have a Green. Now that deployment is done, I have been thinking about the emmc problem and kicking the idea of moving my HA data off of the Green around. But have decided to hold off for it to present itself as a problem.

1- I don’t have experience with it failing infact on the System/Storage page it shows me at 0% life time use of the emmc (but it only reports at 10% increments). For that reason I’ve kicked the can down the road on worrying about my emmc.

Since both my USB ports are occupied, I’ve looked at a USB Hub and a 2.5" SATA <> USB enclosure & SSD. But again, not now.

2- I think data heavy apps are most culpable… eg streaming or heavy duty DB functions. I’m neither of those with no plans to get there.

3 - Don’t buy a green if your automation future has data write heavy requirements. There’s plenty of info on this forum about Intel NUC “hot rod” solutions if that’s your destination.

4- The advantage of the green for me is that I am done with servers. I’m in HA to do HA and not be a sysadmin. HA is my 5th home automation platform, where some were 100% server and some were 100% appliance. The green “skates down the line between” rather well in my opinion. Other than one storage driver update, I have done zero command line. And I’m very happy about that

My requirements are lighter meaning I’m not looking to do video, audio, cameras, database heavy work etc. It looks to me like the green was designed for that, for me. I don’t have any performance complaints about my automations.

I think the Green is well designed in that way, and not yet another RPi clone, they went out of their way to eliminate common problems the Pi platform has introduced

[jhol-byte]

see

Home Assistant Green - eMMC Lifetime Used

I recently received my HA Green and just plugged it in. Under Settings → System → Storage, I noticed that the “eMMC Lifetime Used” is already at 10%. Is this normal? Could there be something wrong with the eMMC module?

and

How to keep your recorder database size under control

Note: This guide was written for an earlier version of Home Assistant (around 2021). Since then, changes have happened, but this guide hasn’t been updated (yet). Please be aware your Home Assistant version can be slightly different, and thus you need to adapt yourself the instructions from this guide. Introduction This is yet another guide on: How to view the size of your database. How to figure out which entities are using too much space. And how to filter them out. I’m running Home Assi…

as well

[ajfriesen (Andrej Friesen)]

I would not worry too much about it.

I have a home assistant blue from 2021, also emmc.
At one point it had 10% wear but now it’s at 0%.

Since the green has just 4 gigs you will most likely not run more than home assistant an this thing.

Go, have remote backups and have fun.

[rdibley]

Thanks for your responses. It helped a lot to put things into perspective. The post from jhol-byte also had a couple of good links regarding the lifetime usage.

@paulbates

The advantage of the green for me is that I am done with servers.

I know what you mean. I’m willing to do a little admin, but my current setup (for the last 7 years) has been on a Raspberry Pi, and every once in a while it just stops working and I have to troubleshoot to get it working again. (usually related to the SDCard) I just want something reliable.

I’m considering other SBC (for performance) that support and boot off a M.2 nvme SSD. I’m assuming that, after installation, there should be no difference in the experience from the HA green? But the HA green might be a little more reliable since it’s the “official” hardware?

Thanks.

Ryan

[ShadowFist]

@rdibley

I’m considering other SBC (for performance) that support and boot off a M.2 nvme SSD

PIs have had SSD boot support in HAOS since the PI4 (probably even since Pi3b).

Why don’t you use your existing hardware & simply add an SSD to it if you just want to avoid SD card issues? There’s plenty of guides how to do that in these forums.

[paulbates]

Hard to say for sure what performance really means.

I have insteon devices that communicate through the insteon plm at serial line speeds. I use yolink and ring which are cloud accounts, all device commands travel to the cloud and back… In all of those scenarios the communication overhead is an order of magnitude slower than the processor/memory/disk.

With no plans for a local llm or video via HA, I think I’m in good shape for a standard config where updates are smoke tested before they get to me.