Looking for advice - Home Assistant Green/Yellow

Hardware
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Hi,

I’ve been using HA for what feels like 10+ years now. I’m not sure. Starting when it was purely YAML files, and HA was one of a few projects all kind of doing the same thing. I’ve migrated from a Raspberry Pi 2, to a 3, then to a 3B+ to a 4, and finally over to a Home Assistant Blue, when they released 3 years ago (I think). I was excited to get a machine that would work pretty much out of the box, and not have to troubleshoot things like the memory card writing so often that it killed itself (yup, that happened to me twice), or writing so much to the logs that the OS stopped working altogether, and I had to format it and copy my YAML files back into the config directory. I was a bit worried about the eMMC, as it essentially has the same problem as an SDCard in the RPi, but better.

So in the last 2-3 months, I’ve come across some problems with my HA installation (ESPHome won’t build a custom firmware for the ESP32 S3 Box 3, and my SkyConnect/Connect ZBT-1 just won’t work any more), and every time I ask on the forums, I get told it’s my fault for buying a HABlue, because they’re known for having issues. I’ll repeat, I bought the HABlue during the announcement, and I’ve only encountered problems in the last 2-3 months, so this wasn’t the help I was hoping for. Right now, the biggest problem is that my SkyConnect is just outright failing to start up, which I’m told is because the USB ports on HABlues are “known to fail”. This was intermittent, and now it appears to be permanent. I can’t find any way to migrate the device to another port, as it seems to be linked to a specific USB port.

My issue is that my HA setup is quite large, and I bought a HABlue 512 GB because I know I’m a data hoarder. The HA Green (my preference on price right now, due to having a kid recently) is only 32 GB, and it is said to be big enough to fit my whole 400 GB installation into. I guess that’s probably true if the migration is just going to kill all my past data, but is it going to be able to cope with the logs?

I WANT to get a HA Yellow, but I don’t have a huge amount of money (babies are expensive, especially when your wife goes on maternity), or time to get this going properly. I could also go the RPi route, but I’ve killed enough SDCards with my HA setup writing (just the default) logs, that this seems like a patch solution at best.

TL;DR:

I’m experiencing issues with my HABlue (I know), and need a solution. HAGreen seems like my best bet, but doesn’t have a lot of space. Will the logs get cleared out before I run out of space, or will the problem I encountered on RPi years ago occur again? Can I just fix my SkyConnect/USB port issues?

Seriously, any advice would be great. I’m somewhere between novice and advanced. I’m not building components, but I’m a software engineer, so I can see the problem’s origins, but not necessarily the solutions.

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Hi Rob Taylor,

If too many logs or out of space problems, check these recent issues…

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You could go the Raspberry Pi 5 route with an NVME SSD. The 100% eliminates the microSD flash memory card concerns. I am using this NVME adapter with this NVME SSD. It boots directly off of the NVME drive, so there is no issue with microSD cards.

I also have a HA Yellow PoE which boots directly off of a Samsung 1TB NVME drive. I will say that the Pi5 is significantly quicker.

Or, you could simply buy a small form factor Intel-based PC, like a NUC, and simply load HAOS directly on it. This is probably the least expensive route, most performant, and very reliable solution.

Good luck with whatever you decide. In any case, you should be able to simply back up your existing system, and restore it to the new one. That’ll save a ton of time.

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I’d suggest to hunt down a used laptop or NUC (if you don’t already have one) and slap proxmox on it. It’ll have at least twice the resources of the Green for the same price.

I promise you won’t regret it.

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I own an HA Blue and ran into issues when compiling yaml for the Box-3. I found reducing the number of processors to one solved the problem. It takes about 30 minutes to compile the code I use but at least it can without rebooting itself. As for the USB problem, I can’t offer any insight on that. Try adding “compile_procesa_limit: 1” to your yaml under esphome:;

esphome:
  compile_process_limit: 1
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Really helpful, thank you @rcblackwell

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I’ve got limited space in my “server cupboard”, I’ve a number of micro-desktops that I’ve turned into servers. I would go that route first. Though, I’m looking at expanding my RPi rack to include a solid state hassio server.

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Thanks @ogiewon, I think this is probably the solution I’m going to follow, with some bits from suggestions below yours. I’ve got a RPi rack, and the idea of adding an NVME boot drive is probably the best idea all around, and would work out a little cheaper than the Hassio Yellow.

Thanks for the suggestion.

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Oh, I thought I’d also mention that I found a temporary solution to the SkyConnect USB issue. I moved it over to the secondary group of USBs and restarted the system, and it migrated everything over on its own. So success, I guess :person_shrugging: