Raspberry pi 3b vs 4

Hardware
21

Thanks for your complete answer. By any chance, have you checked if there is any bluetooth range difference when you use an SD card on the Rpi4 instead of the SSD ?

22

No I didnā€™t do that test as I had spent so long migrating to the SSD from the SD card :slight_smile:

23

Late to the party
Kind of went shopping crazy last night and got 2x Pi 4ā€™s (2GB and 4GB) and 2x Pi 3 A+
I have a Pi 3B that was running the original Home Assistant from back in the day.

I ended up turning that into a RetroPie system and putting my HA inside a Virtual Machine on Ubuntu 18.04
The only thing that sucks was once Hass.IO came out it made it easier to do things like the plugins/addons I had to manually install things like Mosquitto and Node Red.

I have neglected my HA for so long now, and with everything I have being Hue and Tasmota now I really didnā€™t need HA anymore. So I may as well rebuild it all. I have to learn the new integrations, LoveLace, etc.

One hint I will toss out as I saw guys suffering from SD card loss.
The best thing you can do is copy an image of your SD card and have a copy ready to go, but what I did was create a Sama share and regularly back up all the configuration files.

This was also how I edited my config files from my computer with ease.

So I guess I am now in the same boat here, use a Pi 4 for HA, or maybe try to run Hass.IO in a VM? It seems that getting Hass.IO to work outside of a Pi image is kind of hacky and I dont want to find myself wishing I had taken the standard route later on.

Or I guess I could go Docker, but I am not a huge fan because of doing the port mapping and such.

1 Like
24

which to pick raspberry pi 4 2 gb ram or 3 8gb ram?

25

I believe HASS.IO is 32 bit so the Operating System canā€™t address more than 4G of RAM. So unless you are going to use 64bit Linux on your PI and then ā€œdocker itā€ā€¦ the additional RAM will be un-used.
I have been running HA on a PI3b+ with 1G RAM for years without an issue.

1 Like
26

You believe wrong. There is no hassio. And home assistant os is 64 bit.

27

Yeah, I guess they renamed the 32 bit Home Assistant for dedicated PI 4 to hassos:

https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/5.12/hassos_rpi4-5.12.img.xz

Sorry about that.