I have my Home Assistant OS installed on a Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB). I’m using the official PoE+ hat on the Pi, attached to a 1Gb PoE+ port on my switch.
What happens
I’ve noticed this happen twice now. My devices stop working, and I try to connect to Home Assistant, it’s basically dead:
Port 8123 isn’t active.
I can’t access it from Nabu Casa’s Home Assistant Cloud.
It shows up in my UniFi controller and is still pulling power over Ethernet (close to 7W, the normal operating wattage).
Recent changes
The only thing I’ve changed recently:
Upgrading the OS and Home Assistant. I do this regularly.
Swapping from a 32GB microSD card to a USB 3.0 NVMe boot drive. I changed the boot loader to use USB rather than microSD. I eventually plan to change to a Raspberry Pi 5 with NVMe; that’s why I’m using this old 500GB Samsung drive I had lying around.
Why does this happen?
How do I figure out what caused the issue? I don’t know how to use Home Assistant logs to find what may have occurred prior to a restart or what locked it up. Is there a way to get notified if there’s a memory leak or the drive becomes inaccessible or something else?
The only thing you have changed is the nvme drive so my guess is the power supply cant cope with the nvme. Try a powered usb hub as the pi’s usb ports are not good at powering drives, sometimes.
… or it maybe easier to swap back to the microSD card for a period of time to see if the problems stop occurring. But agree with Arh guess that the device is drawing more power than the Pi can cope with. And note that if you do switch to a Pi5 that needs a higher power supply.
I can try that if this happens again. I went ahead and upgraded Home Assistant for this week’s release. Hopefully that issue stops.
I assumed it was the PSU, but PoE+ Pi Hat can provide 25.5W of power. I’m using less than 8W:
I don’t think it spikes to over 25W; then again, I think USB can pull up to 5A (25W) with the Type A cable, and this is a Type C adapter connected via a Type A port. NVMe drives take between 12-18W for high-performance models. This is only a PCIe gen 3 drive.
I’m not overclocking either. I wonder if something else is going on or if this PoE+ Hat is defective. I had one of my other PoE+ hats stop working from this same order, so it’s possible.
