Is a Raspberry Pi really so bad?

Hardware
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So I’m looking for some a new Home Assistant set up and gees it’s not made easy to decide which route to go…

The official docs say “get a Pi!” and it all becomes so easy with HassOS…
“Brilliant!” I think - I know Pi’s, I trust my Pi’s overall and sounds like a nice little project

But then you start looking around - “Don’t use a Pi, SD card’s can’t hack it”, go Odroid like the Pi Blue.
So, Home Assistant release official hardware which is different from the recommended install route… interesting. Maybe I should go Odroid then…

But then you look some more… “oh, you need 8GB, 4GB isn’t really enough”… okay, but the Odroid only seems to come in 4gb variants…

So… now i’m in a state of quandary… is there a simple answer?
I don’t want to be rebuilding again any time soon, so… what’s the best route?

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My thoughts: if you want to use a Pi, use the Pi with a SSD or HDD.

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I am using an Rpi4 8Gb boot SSD and I am very satisfied. Everything runs smoothly without a single outage for more than a year. HA I use the latest version.

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Who told you that? I’m running Home Assistant Container on a Raspberry Pi 4 model B with 2GB of RAM and it’s running just fine. In fact, it’s sitting at about 600 MB of RAM used (and it has other services running on it).
Maybe they were talking about disk space and not RAM.

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Yep. I ran Home Assistant OS (then called 'Hassio") on a Pi3B and SD card for a year or so with no issues until… this hobby got the better of me and I found the size of my system had outgrown it. It took less than 30 minutes to swap over to a Chinese mini PC.

A pi is a perfectly acceptable platform to start out on and even continue to use if you don’t go silly expanding like I did.

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Will HassOS recognise an external drive off the bat? How are you connecting the SSD - via a USB enclosure?

It’s literally all over the forums “if you want to future proof yourself go 8gb” “4gb will be fine when you’re just starting” “upgrading from 4gb to 8gb”

OOI which MiniPC did you swap to? I’m not the kind of person to set something up and swap it, so i’d rather fork out for what I might need now

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My system has grown since then and the PC continues to perform well (though restarts are back up to 30 seconds or so.

alarm_control_panel: 1
automation: 283
binary_sensor: 208
button: 12
camera: 9
climate: 3
device_tracker: 2
group: 10
input_boolean: 57
input_datetime: 27
input_number: 58
input_select: 10
light: 75
lock: 2
media_player: 8
number: 2
remote: 2
scene: 60
script: 163
select: 3
sensor: 597
sun: 1
switch: 98
utility_meter: 3
vacuum: 2
weather: 4
zone: 1
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Sound advice generally speaking, but I must say I owned every generation of RPI since 1 and IIRC I had a sdcard crash exactly once.

Key is to use a proper sdcard, though, (check the RPI forum for recommendation). Not all cards are created equal :wink:

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I use a suptronics X825 board. Boot without a problem. Important that the SSD adapter has UAS support.

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No problem with a Pi. The SDCard wear is the only real problem. As for RAM etc, it will run happily (though perhaps a bit sluggish) at 2GB, and it perfectly happy with 4GB.
I’m now running on a virtual server, since like others - my system got a bit larger - and mine happily runs with 4GB of assigned RAM.

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Vaderag, you’re overthinking it.

... i’d rather fork out for what I might need ...

So tell us, what “might” you need ? What time-frame ? What do you want to achieve ? We’ll take sensors and switches for granted. Home security ? Will you add a voice assistant ? Manipulating multiple video camera feeds ? There are so many directions/uses for Home Assistant that I doubt that you know how you will be using it in 5 years.

Personally I experimented with a RasPi 3B, then repurposed my RasPi 4 (4MB) - which hadn’t lived up to expectations as a Kodi media centre. I run off a microSD card, and yes I know to back up because SD cards are known to fail - but cheap and easy to replace if they do. I have added Rhasspy voice assistant and now use 3 other RasPis as satellite microphone/speaker devices. The RasPi 4 is still ticking over nicely - including doing the speech-to-text, intent recognition and text-to-speech processing for all the satellites. YMMV. In fact, your mileage definitely will vary, because it is your system.

... it all becomes so easy with HassOS…
“Brilliant!” I think - I know Pi’s, I trust my Pi’s overall and sounds like a nice little project

Yes, I echo that advice to start with HA OS on a Raspberry Pi (especially if you already have one). Note that HA’s new Yellow uses a RasPi 4 compute module, so RasPi is still definitely recommended. It’s only by getting started that you will find out where home automation will take you.

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After expanding, the Pi makes a good platform for testing out ideas or new releases without breaking your main system too.

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Well, not really. I already have a well established smart home, running on an Athom Homey, utilising Zigbee, Zwave, Wifi devices across many different brands - I want to transition that and expand for the future.
The Homey cannot support my loads any longer - I don’t want the same things to happen again

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Z-Wave can scale very well but it can be prone to zombie or ghost nodes making a large mess of routing, causing delays. Since you have a fairly complex system to migrate perhaps you should, if possible, evaluate using some existing,likely underpowered system. If you need to purchase a beefier system and plan to move to something anyway, many people purchase something like an Intel NIC. Personally, I was able to use a VM on my son’s existing server.

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3 years running a RPi 3B+ here. Never had a problem with performance or SD card crashes. It barely even taxes the hardware, running at a small fraction of CPU and maybe 40% of available memory.

That said, it depends on your requirements. If you’re going to do a lot of audio or video, or run other things alongside HA, you may bump into hardware limitations. Certainly many others have. I just control and monitor switches, thermostats and various sensors. I use around 30 devices over WiFi and Zigbee, and lots of templates. I have hundreds of distinct entities.

If you’re going to use an SD card, the Recorder database is the real killer. I have no idea why the beginner documentation doesn’t emphasize that you need to exclude everything you don’t want to keep, and set your purge_days as low as you can. I use 5 days. I suspect if you’re going to use a lot of energy monitoring, that might justify an SSD. I haven’t used it, but from what I’ve seen that seems like a real database killer.

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Thanks. TBH, I’m not planning on doing much more than what you say…
Right now I don’t even know what the recorder database is… (guess it’s for tracking what’s going on) but i don’t really want to have to disable things that might be useful…

What size SSD would you need for this? I have an old 32GB one lying around… and a crappy enclosure - would this be sufficient?

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If if was a cheap card, it is likely not a reliable choice. If it is a decent card, you may want to format it with SD Memory Card Formatter first to clean it & mark any failing parts as unusable.

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Card itself is solid (it’s a samsung if i recall out of an old Dell) - it’s the enclosure i’m unsure of

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The enclosure should not be needed except for formatting the card since the Pi accepts the SD Card directly…

Another thing to check is if the power supply is adequate. Some people try using ones that have marginal output.I happen to use a 2.5A power supply.

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I’m talking about SSD not SD

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