I am trying to decide between buying these two devices for an upgrade from existing Raspberry Pi 3:
Raspberry pi 4 Model B 8GB RAM with an SSD (cheapest one is the 120GB)
ODroid N2+ with 4GB RAM and 64 GB storage
The home assistant blue is currently out of stock otherwise I would have just ordered that.
Is 64GB good enough? What uses up most of the storage space in Home Assistant?
Also, Is the 8GB RAM really going to make a difference? I want to guess that if the Home Assistant blue was built with 4GB RAM, they definitely would have done some future proofing there and probably the Odroid N2+ hardware with 4GB RAM is as good as the Raspberry pi with 8GB RAM?
FYI: I jumped on the Home Assistant boat only a month ago.
TL/DR: I switched from RPI4 + SSD to Odroid N2+ with eMMC and couldn’t be happier.
I switched 6 weeks ago from RPi 4 (4GB) with SSD (through USB 3.0 adapter) and I got an Odroid N2+ with 4GB and 64GB eMMC. For me 64GB is enough, since I don’t store media on it. I think for moste people 16 or 32GB will be enough as well. Keep in mind you will lose wifi and blueototh (I never used those anyway). Bonus to me: wifi and bluetooth won’t interfere with the Zigbee module I plug in.
My main reason was: usb boot simply is experimental on Raspberry Pi 4 running HomeAssistant OS. I did extensive research to find te correct SSD and adapter. I had it working great for 6 months. And then suddenly (probably after some OS update) my RPi 4 started to randomly shut off completely. Usually after a week of usage, it all went down and I couldn’t even ping to it.
I restored a backup and same issues. I use the SSD without any issues for something else now. Others might tell you: ‘just do research, I have mine running great for the last X months.’ Well, that’s exactly what I did and bought an adapter that was proven to work the best and followed many guides prior to buying (also used orginal RPi4 power supply). But even then: it’s still experimental. The fact that Home Assistant doesn’t even advise to use it like this, says enough.
Anyway: I don’t want my home to crash down on me randomly. Even when I did get it somehow fixed, there is always a chance something else breaks it down the road (like what happened to me after 6 months). I also hated the fact I had an SSD attached to a usb adapter sticking out of my RPI4. So I figured: let’s get an Odroid N2+ with built in eMMC. If Home Assistant even uses that as it’s ‘main hardware’ it must be supported great. Sure SSD is better than eMMC, but eMMC is still a lot better than microSD and no weird compatibility issues like SSD on RPI4 with USB boot. Also I don’t see any difference between SSD and eMCC in terms of speed now. I also really like that it’s all nice in one casing. I have it running now extremely stable (not a single crash). Also I notice the cpu load is a LOT lower during the day. With RPI4 using 64bit cpu load was always around 1.2-2.2 Rarely below 1.0. Now with Odroid is almost always below 1.0, and a lot of the time around 0.3. I also notice lower temps (while my RPI4 had an actiev fan, my Odroid is passive cooled).
This is the exact response I was looking for. I didn’t even think about the booting from SSD issue. I know a lot of people have got it working and it works fine and Raspberry PI officially claims that it works, but as you mentioned, why take that risk.
I am not going to upload media on this, however might create a separate Plex media server with my Raspberry PI 3 which I can then use with Home Assistant.
Came here with almost the exact same question. Just wondering if the consensus is still that the Odroid is a better option than they RPi 4. Is booting from an SSD still an issue with the RPi? I’m not necessarily planning on using an SSD (at least not right now), but I’d like to be able to potentially in the future.
My main HA instance is running of a Pi 4 using an old-fashioned HDD, but booting from SD. I have 5 more Pi’s running this way (including Pi 1 and Pi 2), never had a problem with this kind of installation. And since the SD is just used for booting, no change of getting a corrupted SD.
so you’re saying you don’t get the issue of homeassistant not working anymore until you buy a new SD card after a power out with this setup? How does it work? I don’t find tutorials on it