Hello everyone! So I only recently started using Home Assistant so that I could control a Sonoff POW R2 and a Sonoff Dual R2 using homekit. It worked perfectly and I even got power monitoring and power cost calculation set up. I plan on adding several more sensors and surveillance cameras to HA in the future as well. I also plan on using Grafana to better monitor my power usage.
I’m currently running Home Assistant on an old ASUS EeePC, booting to Ubuntu Server installed on a 16GB USB 2.0 USB drive and then installing Home Assistant Supervised using Docker. It runs just fine, and even only draws 13 watts of power, which is better than running it 24/7 on a VM using my daily laptop which drew almost 40 watts. CPU usage on the Asus EeePC is also very low, rarely exceeding 5%.
Now, I’ve seen several people on forums reporting that they broke several of their SD cards every couple of months running HA from their Raspberry Pi and several people pointed out that the prolonged read and write activity puts a strain on the SD card causing it to break prematurely. So with that being put into consideration, is it okay for me to keep running HA booted from a USB drive to a laptop? I plan on moving the installation to a 32GB USB 3.0 USB drive.
I decided to boot off of a USB drive because I don’t want to mess around with repartitioning the laptop’s internal HDD. Also, it’s not actually my laptop. It belongs to my mother but she almost never use it anymore. So I figured if the laptop suddenly had to be used for something else, all I have to do is to just remove the USB drive.
Thanks for your time guys!