Intel NUC or MacMini for Home Assistant?

Hardware
1

Hello!
I am currently running my Home Assistant on an Intel NUC i7-8559U CPU 2.70GHz with 16GB.
I also have a MacMini (Late 2018 8,1) with Intel Core i7-8700B 3200 MHz (6 cores) and 32GB available.

Which one of these is more stable running 24/7? I’m thinking about heat issues, too. Which one has the better fans?
What would you recommend?
Thanks!

2

Hi, they both can be equally stable.
Since you already own them, you are most appropriate to make that decision.
I can say this: both system are overkill to just run HA unless you are going to do more advanced stuff.

If your unfamiliar with it, maybe read up on Proxmox VE.
There are also some scripts to install Proxmox & HA in a jiffy: Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts (made by user tteck on this forum)

3

Well I do have a bunch of add ons running like InfluxDB, Grafana, Doods2, Scrypted, Raspberrymatic, just to name a few.
So there’s definetly load on those cores from time to time.
But I agree that both setups are quite capable of doing that job.
I was just wondering maybe one of them is better in terms of ventilation. The Mac mini has a metal casing after all.
I will have a look at Proxmox though!

4

That a lots of power for HA. Both with will run HA the same, but it is like shooting a rat with an Elephant gun! :laughing:

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5

I currently use an Intel NUC5i7RYH in a passive case without issues for my HA instance in a virtualbox headless instance on a W11 host OS, I recently swapping in a spare 250GB NVMe ssd and moved everything over to it leaving the sata based ssd as spare storage/temp cache drive.

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6

I use Intel’s NUC skull canyon also (before i’ve had HA inside VM on Synology). I’d say:

  • for normal use: total overkill, agreed. But then again… owing a powerfull car with 500+HP is also total overkill, but people still do buy them :rofl:
  • for advanced use, like massively using esphome, compiling, using multiple cameras etc…: absolutely wonderful and worthed. The difference in esphome compiling speed vs Synology VM is around 1:5 to 1:10. HA restart also takes below a minute with tons of integrations and sensors.

Skull Canyon is known to run hot. Not if you run HAOS on it, though - the best it gets is around 40-45 degrees (C), since cpu is never at 100%, at least not for long.
Running Proxmox instead of installing HAOS is ok if you plan of doing something else with your NUC beside HA (like creating NAS…), otherwise it will just needlessly slow down HA.

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7

I have previously run home assistant on an Intel NUC i5 for around 3 years and currently a 2011 Mac mini for around 3 years. I only changed as I wanted to repurpose the NUC for something else and I happened to have the old Mac mini.

Both have been equally stable, as mentioned both are overkill. Although I run HA core in docker and not HA OS.

As you have both I would suggest comparing their power consumption and go for the lower power one, after all, all of the energy ends up as heat.

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