Based on a number of posts is a Pi that much slower than other options? (nuc, etc) I’m not doing any real automation yet, just trying to learn about and plan what components to buy and which open source system I’ll go with. (probably HA, I really like it)
I have HA and Hassio running on a Debian VM with very low specs on a 6-7yr old laptop. (1gb ram, maybe 1 cpu). I know it’s not doing much of anything, but it boots, upgrades, runs docker, polls some cloud items and runs automations fine.
and yeah, I can see where the sdcard arguement comes from. It’s not ideal and HA does appear to write to the db and log frequently. Maybe I’ll look at that overlay fs stuff some.
A Pi is fast enough for this project. I highly recommend NOT using a SDCard, and using some type of external HDD, USB thumb drive, or network boot/storage via NFS, due to the disk writes and potential disk swapping.
I just moved Home Assistant from a RPI3B+ to an HP N54L Midi Server. Although the RPI3 ist not slow in general, running Home Assistant, Homegear (Homematic Device Middleware), MySQL and NGinx on it created a constant load > 3. As an effect, I had timing issues with the Homematic Devices.
How do you find the N54L over the Pi? I’m running on a Pi3 and have been thinking over eventually moving it over to my N54L once things start to slow down. Only thing holding me back is the amount of other things running in the Pi that I would want to move across.
I’ve been using a USB thumb drive now for over a year after going thru 2 SD cards in 3 months (mind you good Samsung SDCards too) … so at this point I have to say yes
The speed of the web-ui as primary touch point increased by approx. 300% - 500%. Also - updating HA (using Docker) is much faster. It surely is related to the CPU power of the N54L, the memory (mine has 8GB) and the disk speed (8TB RAID1 vs. 16MB USB2 stick).
Thought as much. I have a 120GB SSD in mine running latest Debian, and 2 x 3TB drives that have been pooled together. The machine as it stands today is nothing more than a glorified NAS. Has 10GB RAM so should be fine. Only thing is it uses more power than my Pi.
I appreciate the info. What about Pi-like alternatives in a similar price range? I don’t necessarily want something larger unnecessarily chewing up power.
I don’t keep any in-house lab gear or a nas that could host a vm at the moment.
I think the pi is fast enough to handle the tasks for home automation, that being said I have recently upgraded to an asrock j4105 home built nuc with ssd and 8 gib of ram and the time to load on a restart (which with the most recent updates of HA have been often) went from around 4 minutes on the pi to about 20 seconds on the nuc. Additionally the pi and the z stick attached to it would take about 10 minutes before response time on the z stick was instant where the nuc is about an additional 30 seconds and everything is fully functioning. So after you get up and running and if you don’t have many changes going on, the pi response is acceptable.
How does one setup usb thumb drive with hassio on an rpi? Would it suffice to move log file and db to thumb drive and if so how does one go about to implement that.
There isn’t a formal guide for this as far as I know yet. There is active work going on to enable external storage with HassOS. I guess (I am not a dev on HassOS) that some time after the 3.0 release of HassOS, they will add ability to use external storage – so it is probably at least several months before anything official would be available.
If you run HassIO on Raspbian / Hasbian / some other manually configured orchestration environment, then you can use whatever you want for external storage. A relatively simple approach would be to relocate /var/lib/docker folder to an automounted USB drive.
