Hi.
Iām about to pull the trigger on an OrangePi 5B with 32GB eMMC, but before I do that, I want to confirm with those who were successful with installing HA on Opi5B, do I need to get an M.2 SSD for it? What would you recommend to add to the shopping list and which guide should I follow to get it all up and running?
Iāve been running HA for a couple of months now in a docker container on an Orange Pi 5. I got a 16GB model with a 512GB NVMe drive, and Iām also running grafana, prometheus & nginx-proxy-manager on it. The only reason I havenāt moved postgres over too is that I was already running that on my N2+ and several other apps are using it so itās not worth the hassle to move it.
The Orange Pi 5 is a much nicer compute server than an rPi 4 if you donāt need WIFI or need the GPIO pin out to exactly match an rPi.
For $139 on the Big River you get 2x the cores, 2x the RAM, and NVMe disk performance that crushes even a USB3 drive on my rPi 4.
The OPi doesnāt ship with screws to hold the drive in the M2 slot, and neither did the SSD, so I ended up having to buy a bag with a half dozen in various sizes https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09J113XZS.
This thing (Orange Pi 5) looks just a tiny bit more performant that my first HA server which was a Orange Pi One with 512MB of RAM sold for $10 in 2017 .
aaaaaaand the ssd dieded. 9 Months lifespan. wellā¦
I ordered a new one, same type, and had huge problems getting that stuff to work.
Little did I know/recognize that this SSD is an SATA model, not an NVME.
Seems like my existing setup booted from an SD-Card and then mounted the SSD to /. It worked, but looking back it was an ugly solution.
New try with another SSD, this time NVME. Some notes for anyone in need:
Changing MAC Address:
After each reboot it assigns itself a new MAC. This doesnāt bother me really as I neither restart it often, nor do I rely on it. But I get some mail from my FritzBox (ISP Box) that a new device was detected.
cgroup wrong: IIRC i did this:
sed -i.bak 's/$/ systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=false/' /boot/orangepiEnv.txt
If you want to achieve a higher lifespan (e.g. more than 9 months) itās advisable to choose a product which uses new and ābrandā flash cells. Typically that means to buy your SSD from a manufacture that is also producing flash cellsā¦ which are only a few world wide anyways: Samsung, WD/Sandisk, Transcend and probably one more I forgot.
Specially for data(base) intensive application like HA it can be quite a short show if one opt-in for the cheapest and/or creepiest (e.g. not advertising TBW) available āSSDā that often made of old and low quality flash cells that were intended for the use in lower quality products like usb sticks.
Orange Pi 5 is more than adequate for any home automation purposes. And it will use much less power. And there has been no need to use SD cards for years, because SBCs do have eMMC and m.2 slots.
And that Lenovo Tiny isn*t that tiny, when you factor in its power brick. Same thing with any mini PC and/or old laptop. And Iām quite sure that if you put Lenovo Tiny (or any other standard PC) in to basements utility spaces, itās going to have shortened lifetime. And if you want to do AI stuff or NVR (or both), Tiny wonāt cut it. Actually, AI accelerators on SBCs help some tasks greatly.
To summarize it, mini PC is bad choice compared to powerful SBC because of many reasons.
Are you aware of any NPU/TPU integrated on a SBC that actually works with frigate/HaOS?
Because I own a s905x3 device with integrated 1.2 TOPS NPU and it is totally useless
In the end I went with old x64 thin client and coral tpu. The performance boost over all is amazing and I got it shipped used for $50 with everything in the box.
If it works for you, then it works for you and thatās excellent. If your use pattern depends on some of the advantages you point out below then a nicely specād SBC will do the job.
Exceptā¦
āAnyā is a very wide claim. Itās not conclusive to say āanyā because one personās use might be much more taxing than another personās.
And while the RK3588 is a very nice ARM CPU, it is slower than even the Intel N100. Itās fairly trivial to find i5 based small from factory PCs (Lenovo Tiny) on eBay with an SSD and 8GB of RAM because these were sold by the millions and widely deployed. Performance and capability wise, they are well above the majority of SBCs.
[quote]
And it will use much less power. And there has been no need to use SD cards for years, because SBCs do have eMMC and m.2 slots[/quote].
It would entirely depend on the the SBC of course. And note that eMMC isnāt equivalent to a real SSD on SATA or M.2. It is entirely possible to burn out eMMC and there have been high profile cases of this happening (ie. Tesla). Database use is absolutely not something I would ever trust to eMMC based on my experience.
I guess that depends on how tight one is for space. If space concerns are such that a 7" x 7" x 1.5" device with a power adapter about the size of any standard laptop power adapter wonāt fit, and a SBC in case with a power adapter (and potentially external SSD case) fits, then the choice is dictated. That seems to be a very narrow limitation however. I doubt this is a factor for the vast majority of users.
Thatās not really true, however. Thereās nothing in a basement or utility room that would shorten the lifespan of a small form factor PC. And if there is (such as extreme temperatures or humidity), then it could certainly shorten the lifetime of an SBC as well.
Lenovo Tinys are widely deployed in many extreme environments. And if that is truly a large concern in the installation, then Lenovo makes hardened Tinys designed for this use. At a price premium, of course.
[quote]
And if you want to do AI stuff or NVR (or both), Tiny wonāt cut it. Actually, AI accelerators on SBCs help some tasks greatly.[/quote]
Wonāt it? To be honest, I donāt have any need for this āAI stuffā so Iāve never looked into it. Iām assuming the āAIā accelerators in SBCs are widely supported, easy to use and can be integrated into Home Assistant with minimal effort then?
Have seen some boiler rooms, not everyone uses gas for heating. They can be hot and they can be dirty. For sure, it shortens life of Tiny/NUC and SBC too, but guess which one stops running first in same hot and dirty environment? It will be that PC with tight packed electronic, multilayered borads (RAM, wifi) and possibly complex cooling. SBC is easier to clean up regularly also.
Teslaās eMMC were burned out, because Tesla was such cheap company they didnāt bother to equip their car with big enough SSD. You know, thereās write endurance rating nowadays for SSD, usually specsed in multiples of memory device capacity. eMMC has wear leveling in controller, just like SATA and NVME devices. Memory cards donāt have. eMMC isnāt really magically worse than SATA or NVME, and you can buy SATA and NVME with bad enduranc. Interface doesnāt guarantee anything itself.
And finally, why buy old desktop/laptop to run something important, you never know what kind of beating it has gotten? When you buy new, you have reasons to believe it will last intended use. And it will have warranty.
[quote=āhonkkkis, post:39, topic:498585, full:trueā]
Have seen some boiler rooms, not everyone uses gas for heating. They can be hot and they can be dirty. For sure, it shortens life of Tiny/NUC and SBC too, but guess which one stops running first in same hot and dirty environment? It will be that PC with tight packed electronic, multilayered borads (RAM, wifi) and possibly complex cooling. SBC is easier to clean up regularly also.[/quote]
In my nearly 3 decades of professional IT work since 1995, Iāve installed equipment in nearly every environment out there. If you think the boiler room is bad, try a paper mill or a recycling plant. 100% humidity, 35C, 24/7. Or a machine shop with a loading bay open to the world in which not only is everything covered with a fine layer of increasing metal dust but the equipment is exposed to -40 to +40 temperature swings.
Standard PC hardware, while not ideal (I always recommended sealed systems, which are always overruled due to cost) seems to last fine.
Of course, one should always choose the system based on the environment and if a SBC is the best choice, then it should be used.
There are however Tiny/NUC style systems that use no fans and are relatively well sealed. Certainly more sealed up than most SBC cases out there. With no active cooling needed, there are no fans to fail and no dust/gunk sucked through the chassis.
All SBCs use multi-layer circuit boards. There is simply no way to build these things to size using only a single or double sided board. Multi-layer boards have been commonly used since the '60s.
[quote]
Teslaās eMMC were burned out, because Tesla was such cheap company they didnāt bother to equip their car with big enough SSD. You know, thereās write endurance rating nowadays for SSD, usually specsed in multiples of memory device capacity. eMMC has wear leveling in controller, just like SATA and NVME devices. Memory cards donāt have. eMMC isnāt really magically worse than SATA or NVME, and you can buy SATA and NVME with bad enduranc. Interface doesnāt guarantee anything itself.[/quote]
eMMC wear leveling is more similar to SD cards than SSD. The hint is in the name, with eMMC being a subset of the MMC storage standard. That doesnāt make it worse, that makes it different. The issue there is, that eMMC is a bit harder to replace than SSD as most of the time (not always) eMMC is soldered to the board. If longevity and warranty coverage is important as you indicate below, eMMMC may not be the right choice.
Teslaās eMMC issue was a combination of factors. Not having enough over provisioning, and mistreating the eMMC with many small inefficient writes. The sure way to burn out any MMC based storage and up until recently, a real problem with HA due to the database schema/handling.
One thing to note is that eMMC usually has a lot less over-provisioning than SSD due to expected use patterns and cost goals. That in itself can drastically reduce eMMC endurance vs. SSDs. One hopes that a eMMC storage is chosen based on the expected workload.
New Tinys and NUCs are available from many vendors with warranties if a warranty is a concern.
Used equipment is fine. One would give it a once-over before putting it into production. Used enterprise grade hardware (such as hardened Tiny/NUC style systems) is still very inexpensive and built to a far better standard than the majority of SBCs.
I have installed a lot of new equipment over the years only to have it fail shortly after. Stuff sometimes just fails. Being new does not negate this.
I have installed HA via docker on the Opi5 for my neighbour. Works great but I can not seem to get Hacs on it. Did anyone have a solution for the docker version of HA? I have 2 Opi5ās but didnāt move my own instance to it from the RbPi4 because of the hacs and add-on store