Fake News. USB boot on Pi3 works perfectly well.
Thanks again for input sparkydave. I did a quick google search on Synology NAS, and it seems it is tied up to hardware. Based on this link https://www.pcmag.com/roundup/294930/the-best-nas-network-attached-storage-devices it seems the cheapest one runs about $166.
I have a brand new Pi 4 and a good (think it is Evo) 128 GB card, and a few good smaller SD cards. By Friday I should have my new 480 GB Kingston SSD and the USB 3.0 to SATA adapter. The main purpose of the hardware is to run Hass.io or HA installed via docker or similar. I am not looking to squeeze the most use out of the hardware, and seems Hass.io, a NAS and Pihole should be able to run at the same time without much issue. Might install influxdb and graf later on.
At the moment I do have a bad UPS (works fine for a few days, then it starts to beep, turn it off for a few days plug it back in, and it seems to work for a few days again) that I plan to replace in the near future.
One of the main reasons I am tied to a Pi for my HA is because I do use the on board pins to read sensors and control some relays. Originally I was going to use the old Pi 3 B on my GFs house but then I realized I won’t be using the pins on her house, so I can just run zoneminder and HA on an old laptop of hers and call it a day. I assume there would be something else I could purchase for a Synology setup to have access to pins, but that just tarts getting bigger and more expensive.
I am on the “thinking” stage at the moment, so any input is very appreciated. For example I don’t even know if I can run hass.io, pihole and NAS without having to use a docker (which I am not sure exatly what it is, nor have I ever played with docker).
The Synology NAS lets you install docker simply by clicking a single button in the GUI. Then just install as per the generic linux docs.
Instead of using RPi pins for I/O, have a look at ESPhome. ESP8266’s (like NodeMCU or Wemos D1 mini) are super cheap and work perfectly with HA.
Again, thank you for your great suggestions which I am sure will be useful to other users that are getting started.
I am a bit familiar with 8266s, in fact I am using about 6 ESP 8266s to control my lights and fans, and plan to purchase many 8266 cams because they are so damn cheap, but those require a working network to work. For my regular lights it is ok if network goes down, but the things I want to hook up directly to the Pi’s pins I want to be able to continue running properly even if my home network is down, which is why I have a UPS set up as well.
The Synology option seems like a very good one. Priced at $166 is not much more than what I’ve already put in to get the Pi 4 working. People say “Pi 4b with 4GB” is only about $55 (or is it $65), but once you add the power adapter, the case and the SD card we end up getting closer to $100, and if you add a USB SSD like I plan to do, we end up closer to $160. Without doing much research something tells me Synology as a NAS would work much better than a pi 4 with an SSD set up as a NAS, but the Syology is bigger in size and to use pins I would have to buy additional hardware and be dependent on more variables (wifi working, etc) for my system to work properly.
I do appreciate your input, and I have learned a lot thanks to it. My GFs old laptop is OLD, so down the road I might consider Synology as an option when it comes time to upgrade that for her. Last year she wasn’t happy with the Alexa Echos I got for her and her daughter and all the smart switches I put in her house. A year later she appreciates it, and now that she gets to see my set up at my own house (cameras, sensors, email alerts, etc) she now appreciates it much more and wants me to continue building on her set up. At the moment she doesn’t even have HA, everything at her house runs straight from Alexa.
Not sure about the RPi4 (obviously it’s more powerful) but I tried running a RPI3B+ as a NAS and it was absolute rubbish. The transfer speed was far too slow to be usable. I bought a Synology and couldn’t be happier
No expert, but if I understand correctly there are a couple of changes on the Pi 4 that makes it a better candidate to run a NAS. 1 the network jack seems to be a true 1gig now since the bus is not being shared with something else, and 2 the addition of USB 3.0.
I am not down talking Synology, in fact I still would like to assume it would work better as a NAS than a Pi 4 mainly because it seems Synology was built to be a NAS from the get go. For my use, I hope the pi 4 as a NAS would be good enough since I don’t plan to use it as a media center or anything like that. I just want to push video and photos from zone minder running on another machine, and ever so often watch a few vidoes or pictures from it. Down the road I might get a bit more fancy and run two drives mirrored for redundancy but as it stands it would almost be a miracle if my SSD crashes the same day I get a break in from thieves that were smart enough to turn off power to my house before going in. (Here in Mexico at least is not common for regular burglars to cut off power to the house before breaking in)
You don’t need that much throughput for only a few 4k (or 8k what have you) camera video streams. The cameras probably don’t move, so the image is mostly static h264 (h265) and you can probably expect average bitrates of around 1-2 Mbps at night, and 4-5 Mbps per camera during the day (10-15 for 8k) when there’s more light for detail and more activity.
Pi4 has a proper pair of 5gbps usb3 ports that supports streaming bulk transfers, so that you can actually achieve close to 500MB/s from your drives without burning all your CPU.
It also has an actual gigabit network port.
Pi3b+ can boot HassOS from a USB connected SSD, without an SD card.
Pi4b can’t do that yet (the raspberry pi foundation hasn’t implemented USB booting on the 4 yet, they might in the future)
There’s a separate thread (spanning multiple months) where people have got their pi4 to boot HassOS from a microsd card, that then runs off of a full size USB SSD once booted. This is a good thing because it moves storage i/o from an SD card, to more durable and faster storage, making the whole system feel snappier as well.
Rpi4 HassOS microsd images are already running a beta release of the supervisor that allows for this hybrid approach to storage.
You could run home assistant on raspbian, either in docker or in a python venv, but personally I like the HassOS setup where you have add-ons as containers, and the easy backup / easy restore story that comes from the separation of writable and read only data that containers there provide. I run my pihole as a container add-on, there’s samba add-on available as well as various VPN add-ons. Naturally the x86 based hardware in most of the Synology units will feel faster, but I like the small form factor/low power use of the pi over a 4/8/rack mountable Synology - and I have no doubt it’ll remain a popular way to run home assistant.
Sorry for offtopic but could someone point a good guide how to setup pi 4 with SD / SSD boot?
Hurrah! I get to be helpful! https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-4-usb-boot-config-guide-for-ssd-flash-drives/comment-page-3/ I haven’t tried it yet. The instructions are for raspbian but after reading the instructions I don’t see why it wouldn’t work with hass.io (HA, vs hass.io vs HassOs still has me confused)
This is the long thread that explains various options, incl. the variant with bootcode.bin on microsd and hassos on USB/SSD
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Ok, so I was with you (I understood) up until you mentioned HassOS, add ons as containers, etc.
Never used docker. I thought I was using hass.io on my Pi3b, the version of HA that runs on Pi with nothing else installed. It has many add ons one can select, like mqtt broker, yaml config within the web browser, etc. The little that I know is that the “flavor” of hass I was running its updates came a few day later after the regular HA updates, and you could usually apply them by just clicking update on the web interface. So was I running hass.io or HassOs?
From what I’ve read seems booting raspbian from SD onto SSD for is well documented and stable. From the reading I did I don’t see why it would be that difficult to boot from SD on SSD with hass
The hassio image you downloaded for your pi, doesn’t really have the home assistant in it. It has hassos, which contains docker and on first boot resized its filesystem to the size of the card, and download hassio, which is a homeassistant docker image, that it runs in a container. Add-ons that you install are docker images that get to run in docker containers on hassos, alongside hassio/homeassistant image.
There’s a way you can run just the home assistant on your own OS and you can manage it yourself, which is more complicated IMHO.
Hass.io runs in docker however you install it. You can think of hassOS as the operating system… like Raspbian for example.
You can actually run Raspbian (booting of SSD) and install docker and then do a generic linux install of Hass.io - that is how I run my system (except I use Debian, not Raspbian) It is a more complex install.
So another way to look at it, all Home Assistant setups run hass.io, and there are many ways to install hass.io. One simple way is to run hass.io is with HassOs which is a stand alone install (no debian, raspbian, etc needed) which includes the environment needed to run hass.io.
I think I’ve only used HassOs which gives you the ability to do add ons very easy. From what I am now reading seems I was wrong, and that booting from SD to SSD Raspbian is working, but not SD to SSD HassOS is not. So for my setup I would have to install raspbian, then install hass.io via docker which would give me a full Home Assistant setup, but to do add ons and other things wouldn’t be as easy as if I was running HassOS
No… You can run HA in a venv or even docker and that isn’t hass.io… if you want hass.io with addons etc then you either have to use hassos (with the image for your hardware) or a generic linux install etc - as documented in the hass.io install docs.
Or you can just install Home Assistant in one of the documented ways.
Actually no. If you install hass.io (as opposed to home assistant) you get the full hass.io options including addons.
I recently switch from a rpi3+ to NUC-like device (with Intel Celeron J4105 CPU) with 16 Gigs RAM running PROXMOX and and it is a huge improvement. Using 2 Cores for hassio and 6 Gigs for RAM for hassio is more than enough. Pricewise there is not much different: motherboard with CPU is approx. 80 Euros (plus RAM) whereas RPI4-4G is 60-65 Euro and you will get full SATA, USB3, GB-LAN with WOL, etc, etc. so featurewise also a big improvement.
I don’t regret the switch to a celeron and you can run a lot of VMs/LXC on the physical machine, like PiHole, NAS (openmediavault), etc.
I would second the use of Synology as a NAS. I have had a couple of them and they are solid systems. The only thing I didn’t care for was the DNS/DHCP services they offer, so I use Pi-hole running on its own Pi3b.
I bought an RPi4 [4GB] for a monitoring solution- tried Shinobi, Motion, ZoneMinder and couldn’t get decent framerates with a single 1080p or 720p HEVC stream. Then I learned that although the RPi4 has HW support for HEVC, Raspbian currently doesn’t have any native support that will let applications take advantage of it, and that such support will come only once a developer implements it in v4l2-- something which there is no projected timeline, as I can best surmise. Quite the bummer.
So I tried a single h264-encoded 1080p and 720p streams with the above solutions- to similar disappointment of abysmally-low frame rates.
What did work splendidly was feeding the RTSP address to VLC- whether h265 or h264, 1080p streams were working buttery smooth. But can’t add a second camera to the mix because VLC won’t open a second instance. [And VLC is likely using using a SW decode running on the CPU? And although FFMPEG claims hevc-v4lcm2m support, supposedly that bridge is not yet implemented all the way through to the hardware level, but this is all above my paygrade.]
So my last resort was to run Synology Surveillance Station on my old DS415+, which can handle h264 without issue, and using Chromium on the RPi4 to view it full-screen which it does quite well. Just concerned that when I try to add 3 more IP cameras it will bog down the frame rate.
I have a 3B+, and it has been doing a stellar job, I honestly can’t tell the difference from when I was running it off of a 12 core server (though I don’t use excessively power hungry addons). For storage I went with a Samsung Pro Endurance, the 32Gb card can be filled empty to full every day for almost 18 years before hitting the failure limit. You can get the larger capacity cards for more longevity too.
If your 3B+ (like mine) is still doing the job, I’d wait. There is no compelling reason to move to a 4, and depending on your environment, it can add some challenges.