I know these typeof questiona have been askd seberal times, but still struggling around so i am asking forsome feedback.
Currently running HA on a RPi3b.
Thinking of upgrading to a mini pc as i‘d like to have:
more cpu power for running ha, node-red, influxdb, grafana nd some more add-ons
an SSD for hetting more performance and endurance (had some issues with even good SD cards)
still stay in a fanless or very silent type
low power usage
currently maybe using vm based install together with PiHole or similar, replacing anotherRPi3,
still want to stay mostly low on administrative effort
As hardware, thinking of a Zotac zBocCI329 or NUC7PJYH, preferable firstone as its fanless.
Think this would be a good alternative toupgrading to RPi4?
Please give me some feedback, i am thinking correct with SSD?
You probably don’t need the power of a NUC unless you’re doing very resource intensive tasks like, video motion detection, facial recognition, LPR, etc.
A pi4 will be more than enough to do what you mentioned. In fact a pi4+ssd is way overkill for most HA uses. I’ve got a pi4 running all those things you mentioned (node-red, influx, grafana, esphome, etc)… and with a lot of devices (like 60+… and many of those are sending data several times per second as well). The pi4 handles it all with a load average of like 0.01… way overkill as I said. It would easily handle a pihole as well. Don’t worry about how complex your node-red gets either… mine is I think more complicated than most folks, and the pi4 handles it fine (all automations are essentially instantaneous). Also with an SSD, you won’t have to worry about your DB slowing things down.
That said, I use HA not only for automation, but also for security. So I’m of the mindset that the HA device should not handle anything else that could make it less reliable. I run diversion on an asus router (like pihole on crack), but if I didn’t have that, I’d probably just put the pihole on the pi3, and keep the pi4 just for HA only. Like I said, a pi4 will handle pihole and HA, but it just adds more complexity which is not wanted if you are using it for security as well.
@truglodite: Thanks very much for your fast and helpful feedback. I will now start over with a RPi4.
Also plan to replace my seperate RPi3 with PiHole with the HA AddGuard extension.