Now when I have lots of troubles with my HassIO on my RPI 3b+ I started to wonder…
It actually looks like I have some sort of an I/O problem with my RPI SD-card maybe - it could have started yesterday when I had to delete a lot of old snapshots because it was out of free space for an 0.94 update. And I have struggled a lot lately with updating HassIO and add-ons like Muqitto and Node-red etc. And now I can see that docker is creating a new container each minute (longest time alive is about a minute when I from console write docker ps and see the container list).
Then I now starts wondering ---- is RPI with SD-card that clever to use because of maybe extremely large I/O traffic ? Will all this traffic not harm the SD-card and then the end gets nearer by the minute (if you get what I mean).
What will then be a better alternative for a None-server-expert like me? I don’t want to have a big noisy server in my house. I have a MacMini (silent) on my desk and an old Synology DS210j in the closet and then I have a shitload of old and new RPI’s - I want to keep my “home assistance” in-house otherwise I had gone for Google home or Apple home.
I ran HA for over a year on a mid range SD card (no longer sure which one, Samsung EVO or Sandisk something-or-other) with a total of zero SD card problems. Many others do too. However there are some users that do run into SD card write endurance problems. Possibly due to using small capacity cards that will have less wear levelling, possibly due to not using the recorder exclude options. Possibly due to plain old bad luck.
The pi is an easy low price entry point but yes once your system grows in size the pi does start to lag a bit.
There are some very cheap good quality fanless Chinese mini PCs that can be used as an alternative.
Edit: a cheap second hand laptop (anything that can run linux) is a good option too. It comes with battery backup!
Cool thank you very much. I think battery backup could be perfect also. Yesterday the house was hit by 2 power failures that might have been root course for the hassIO breakdown - I don’t know how resistant Docker is to power failures.
All of my RPi3’s run off 120GB SSD’s - I gave up with SD cards ages ago. You can get 120GB for £16 these days - its almost cheaper than an SD card. I have them in WD cases designed for the Pi and their PiDrive and they are great, but sadly WD stopped making them
Our Pi has been amazing and we run 80 automations.
The move for us from a Pi to a mini PC or NUC is overkill so looking at the N2 or Pi 4 (when it comes out).
There is a little lag now and then as we have the MQTT broker on the same Pi. Can’t be bothered getting another Pi to separate this out.
Should I maybe consider buying a new Synology Nas and kick out the old DS210j - this I only use for remote backup of another Nas DS216+ and the new Nas should then only be used for Docker and Home Assistant (HassIO). My present DS210j is very stable but it cannot run DSM6.0. It even send me notifications when it has been offline, hm. but OK I have power management so it close down in the night. It will then consume more power (hm well maybe I shouldn’t)
Just remember Hass.io on HassOS will not boot from a USB device… You can install Raspbian Lite + Docker + Hass.io but that’s as a generic Linux install. I did do that before I got my NUC almost a year ago.
The KILLER for the Pi and SD cards is an inadequate power supply and intermittent power as well and poor quality SD Cards. I never had a problem with a Samsung EVO 32gb card…
