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.