Is this mini PC better than a Raspberry Pi4?

Hardware
1

I am currently running HAOS on a Raspberry Pi4 8GB on an SD card, as I read several concern regarding the realiability of SD Cards I am moving to an External SD drive and I was planning to also move out from the Raspberry.
I bought this mini pc:

Specs:

  • CPU: Intel Celeron N3350
  • GPU: Intel HD Graphics 500
  • RAM: 6 GB
  • ROM: 64 GB eMMC
  • Cache: 2 MB; numero di core: 2
  • WiFi: dual band 2.4G + 5G; LAN: 10,100,1000 M
  • Bluetooth: versione 4.2
  • SSD da 2,5 inc
  • Graphic frequency: 200 MHz; frequency burst: 650 MHz

And an external SSD Drive of 260GB.

I just installed HAOS on the external drive connected to the mini PC and I am in the process of restoring my backup just now. But I just realized that I do not really question myself if this setup is better than the Raspberry Pi4 8GB I had till now and I have not the experience to judge hardware specifics.

Can you please advise me if I am doing a mistake/downgrade or I am on the right way ?

Thank you

2

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_celeron_n3350-vs-raspberry_pi_4_b_broadcom_bcm2711

Screenshot 2023-10-06 at 15-26-39 Intel Celeron N3350 vs Raspberry Pi 4 B (Broadcom BCM2711) Benchmark comparison and differences
Screenshot 2023-10-06 at 15-26-39 Intel Celeron N3350 vs Raspberry Pi 4 B (Broadcom BCM2711) Benchmark comparison and differences973Ă—799 49.9 KB

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3

I would recommend not installing HA directly to the new hardware, but instead install it via Proxmox. This way you can later decide to have additional virtual servers running on the same hardware to save energy (and space and cabling, etc), like for example a reverse ssl proxy for home assistant, a vpn server for remote access, a NAS for your media, a database for Kodi, a DNS-Adblocker for your LAN, etc. without being confined to what is available as a HA addon.

Home assistant users usually tend to be technically inclined and will develop the need for more servers for other stuff sooner or later, I guarantee you.

4

I would definitely recommend moving from the SD card to an SSD.

However, if you are happy with the performance you are getting from the Pi, why spend the extra money for the sake of it? I’ve been using HA (container) on a Pi-4 2GB with an SSD for several years now with no issues whatsoever. I imagine that one day I will want to upgrade to something more powerful (maybe when/if I add video processing) but, right now, with ~60 devices over Z2M/Mosquitto and a further ~10 devices over WIFI, I have no response or stability issues. …just a thought to save you some money.

5

I tried to go the way you reccomend for days but I cannot manage to get Proxmox install to work, I have and error regarding the command unsquashfs failed with exit code 1 on line 870. After trying several things I temporary give up and I installed on the External SSD.
Looking at Tom’s screenshot the new hardware seems to be slighly better than Pi4.

I have been delighted to see how good the restore worked (even if I was looking for the “Restore in progress” page forever, than I tried to go to homeassistant.localhost:8123 from another browser page and the process was alredy completed!).
What surprised me most is that by just plugging the Conbee II zigbe stick in the new hardware al my zigbee network back working perfectly in a second.

6

You are probably right about “spend extra money for the sake of it”, you know… we are a little bit kids always looking for a new toy.

I was happy with the Pi4 but you don’t know what you don’t know, I was curious to see if my HA experience could be even better with another hardware. I question myself “will stuff react quicker?” and things like that.

7

:+1:

If (for example) HA’s reaction to a button push is currently “immediate” in feel (as mine is), I’m not sure what a mini PC will do for you unless you are about to expand etc. However, if HA’s reaction to a button push is ~1 sec or more, I am sure you will notice an improvement.

8

I have a mix of Zigbee and Tuya devices (I really want to get rid of those!) and sometimes response time to button push yes, take 1 or more seconds. To be honest I think this is due to Tuya Cloud and not HA itself but worth a try.

9

I am against Proxmox. I’ve used in the past, enjoyed it a lot, but later on - dropped it and never looked back.

Pros of using Proxmox:

  1. You can give access to other people to manage servers. For example, my friend who lives abroad uses my hardware to host his gaming server. What I did is to install Proxmox and let him manage his VM. He can do whatever he wants and it’s great for me, since I don’t have to deal with anything.

Cons of using Proxmox:

  1. If you decide to use Frigate - USB accelerator would have issues. Happened to me, but also in Frigate docs it is written very clear - users should use bare metal. USB passthrough somehow did not work.
  2. Additional mess dealing with GPU passthrough.
  3. Now you have to maintain/update minimum 2 OS installations instead of just 1.
  4. You lose a bit of performance.

In corporate environment it’s day and night difference - VMs all the way, but for 1-3 physical servers at home, virtualization is not necesarry and usually a unnecessary bloat.

Myself I installed HA as Docker container and it’s super great. I can have its definition in docker-compose.yml for easy upgrades, next to dozen of my other Docker containers. Using restic backup solution I can perform automated backups nightly to my favorite storage provider - the whole directory where container data is stored.

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10

Yes, the cloud will slow things down (I don’t have Tuya).

11

I also tried using VMs and ended up using docker & compose.yaml. You can upgrade & downgrade so easily. I backup daily using HA’s built-in backup service and then use Duplicati (also running in a container on my Pi) to an external provider.

12

Maybe try to own them. If they are running with supported realtek, beken or esp chips you can install esphome on it and enjoy full control with local push :rocket:

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13

And if those devices are not supported (yet) you can use tuya-local. Then all communication is on your local network. Optionally you can then even disable internet access for those devices in your router (also need to disable DNS access). It’s not as good as ESPHome but better than always using the cloud.

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14

You have already bought and paid for the N3350 machine so all ideas of what you should buy instead are pointless.

It is more powerful than a Raspberry Pi but the N3350 has only two cores. Forget virtualization and Proxmox.

For several reasons.

Your little new machine has the perfect capacity to run the HAOS with Home Assistant and a couple of Addons of the type that do not load the CPU too much. You will have a good reliable system.

Remember that HAOS is an operating system. Inside HAOS a number of Docker containers are running that makes up the working Home Assistant environment. HAOS is created for making a good solid bridge between the hardware interfaces like USB and Home Assistant itself.

When you run in a virtual machine then you add additional layers. Proxmox is built on Debian. And then you have the virtual machine layer. And inside that an additional operating system HAOS (based on Alpine Linux). Each layer is something that can break.

I have lost count of the number of reports we see every month where people upgrade something and say “my Conbee II stopped working”, “my Zwave2mqtt” lost all devices", “my Zigbee2mqtt lost all devices”. And notice - many run … Tata … Proxmox. And then downgrade and reload backups and loose even more.

Don’t. yes it can work. I have tried to run HA on Proxmox myself on a beefy 8 core i7 machine for development and testing of betas. And then it is not critical that it breaks

Home Assistant is a box that will run your home. When you have automated everything and turned your house into Starship Enterprise your entire life is depending on Home Assistant being reliable. And the most reliable way to run Home Assistant is with HAOS on bare metal, on hardware the HA developers use. Ie. a short list of Arm single board computers or a standard 64 bit 386 machine. Anything else is asking for trouble.

Personally I have ended up running my Home Assistant as HAOS on a Home Assistant Blue (Odroid) which is one of the short list of ARM single board. Rock solid! Only Addons are file editors and ssh.

And I have two more small computers.

An i5 based NUC running Debian 12 on which I run Mosquitto, Deconz, Zigbee2MQTT, Zwave-UI, Mailserver, and Unifi. N. ESPHome, Zigbee2PQTT and Zwave run in Docker. Rest on bare betal installed with apt. I run two parallel Zigbee networks but will probably phase out Deconz and put all on Zigbee2MQTT which continues to impress me.

An n100 based Asus mini computer running my Web site (lavrsen.dk) and my Frigate. Frigate needs lots of resources! if I did not have 6 cameras on Frigate I could have run it all on one computer. The new N100 is so nice. Lots of power and no fan!

15

Yes, reading through this I feel you are right. The idea around installing Proxmox was mainly my willing to practice with something I never used before but I was running HAOS on the Rasperry Pi4 since 2 years and it always worked fine. In those years I falled into the rabbit hole and I have now hundreds of devices connected to HA. I went even too far pushed by the willing to make everything smart asap and I will lickely now go back on some of my past choices.
I feel I want to get rid of Tuya, to get rid as much as possible from every cloud thing and to back withing the fundamental stuff (I have several wall swiches and some of those are not wired but synced with the wired one with a blueprint).

And back to your point, I realize I am pretty happy with HAOS and I don’t feel I really need much more. It worked perfectly for 2 years, now I backup my previous system, installed HAOS on a different machine, on a different external media, moved the Zigbee stick and after the restore everything works again perfectly. There is not a single thing not working.

16

This is something I really would like to do.

I try to play with Tuya Local and Local Tuya twice but I am not 100% conviced by those yet.
First time I setup Local Tuya I think I remember that when my internet was down those devices were not working, maybe I did something wrong. Also configuration is an headhache to me, I have to know what each thing is and I always feel I am missing to setup something and I don’t like that feeling.

In the last 2 days I gave it another try and I have now all my wall swiches setup with Local Tuya but I think one day or another I will try to go the ESPHome way.

17

I understand your perspective, and I agree in theory. If you already ahve 3 servers, then you have 3 devices capable of running proxmox. If you have 3 proxmox instances, you can consider High Availability / clustering, and that is where VMs really start to shine. At that point, you really don’t need any more hardware, just slowly start upgrading to add more power.

It’s a bit of overkill, sure, but there are more benefits to Proxmox / VMs than you’ve listed.

  1. Easy to migrate from one hardware platform to another.
  2. Ability to take snapshots before upgrading things.
  3. If you do decide to branch out into other technical things, you can just spin up a VM and try things out pretty easily.

With docker you can backup you HA, install docker on a new physical device, and restore. That is fairly simple, but I’d argue migrating a VM is much easier and less annoying. The only challange is installing ProxMox on the new hardware, but if you have ProxMox on everything, than that step is a given.

The snapshots are, in my opinion, a major upgrade to just using docker. I can take a snapshot of my HA, install an update, and then if things break, just restore. No issues. With docker, you’ll have to take a backup, rebuild the container, then if it fails, edit your compose file to take the older, pre-update version, rebuild the container, and then restore the backup. That’s still not that bad, considering HA’s backup utility is pretty good, but I’d rather have the snapshot.

Either works, and they both work very well. If you’re already at the enthusiast level where you’re managing your own home servers, I’d argue it’s worth the extra effort to get VMs setup. If that’s going to be a barrier that keeps you from moving forward, then shelf it for later.

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18

I understand your perspective

And I understand yours. I mean it.

At home most people are interested in other things compared to “corporate environment” - price and noise.

  • 3 servers for HA - too pricey.
  • 3 servers power consumption - too pricey.
  • multiple disks for RAID - too pricey.
  • Server hardware - too loud.

Hence this is why myself (and I believe many other folks) live with only a single compact and silent “server” with only a single SSD inside and no UPS. Failure of SSD would lead to data loss, hence the backup to external storage provider is basically a necessity. When you take snapshot - where are you gonna save it to prevent data loss? Oh wait, on top of that you also have a backup solution inside the server. Now you have 2 kind of backups! Or better - you have a NAS with RAID storage - again it’s costly and not everyone have it. And if you ever decide to migrate to bare metal - you would have hard time dealing with snapshots…

Most of these features that Proxmox brings are just unnecessary for a home server. On the other hand, most of Docker services that could be found in home servers do not really need a backup prior upgrade. Just simply rollback to a previous image and problem is gone. If you are really paranoid of losing data - make sure you have a working nightly/hourly backup and do it right before Docker images upgrade.

Here are some alternatives that Proxmox offers, which can be replaced for bare-metal installation:

  1. https://netboot.xyz/ for netboot functionality for your other servers in the LAN.
  2. https://restic.net/ for backups. Incredible software - has all the checkmarks I needed when I discovered it.
  3. Grafana + TSDB (I prefer VictoriaMetrics) + metrics shipper (I prefer Telegraf) for performance/usage visualization and alerting.

EDIT: Actually it’s a nice discussion going on here. We both are neither right and neither wrong. Hopefully our comments would help users to decide which path they should go. :v:

2 Likes
19

I agree, I think back-and-forth conversations like this are good. Hopefully it helps some people make the right decision for themselves.

Right now, I’m not doing most of what you mentioned. It’s part of my long term planning, but I agree, home setups are cheaper and less involved than enterprise server setups.

I got a Zimaboard with CasaOS installed. Quickly kind of grew out of that, then had to make a decision between debian with lots of docker images, or Proxmox. I had experience with VMWare, so Proxmox wasn’t that big a leap for me.

So for now, I have proxmox on a Zimaboard, and just installed another instance on an old laptop I had lying around. So it’s pretty feasible on cheap hardware.

Snapshots aren’t backups. But your point is well taken, I’d need some external NAS to target for my backups if I were doing this. That’s really not too different from saving a HA backup on your desktop, but VMs are gonna be larger.

My biggest reason for choosing VMs over docker is networking, and familiarity. I have multiple LAN connections to my ZimaBoard, and multiple VLANs setup. Home Assistant is on one, UniFi another, etc. Networking is very easy in Proxmox and a bit more clunky with docker images. Also, USB pass-through is a lot simpler (in my opinion) over the awkward docker compose mappings.

It’s also nice I get a dashboard of system performance and usage. And if I wanted to play with an all docker setup on Debian, I can just make a debian VM and try it out.

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20

I tried, I really tried but without success. If you would like to help me look this: Tasmota flashing frustration