Hi all, i need to upgrade my build since the old pc i used just broke. I was thinking about a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB RAM and 128GB of memory for about 100 dollars or an Intel NUC, same RAM same memory, for almost the twice of the price.
What do you suggest? Does HA run good on that Raspberry or i need to go higher with the Intel one? Considering also the price difference.
Thanks.
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Depends totally on your needs. Do you run or are planning to run object detection, multiple cameras or other heavy tasks? If so go for the NUC, otherwise the Pi is totally fine.
Please consider that there are a lot of issues with the Pi4 and SSD. I’m still trying to find the right combination.
I’m planning in the future to have cameras and several automations. So i think Pi 4 is not suitable. What do you think of a build with Intel Pentium E5300 and 8gb ram? Since it’s a 3 floor house there will be lot of devices, will i be limited with that kind of build?
Thanks, so i don’t think Pi 4 is worth the money at this point.
Automations won’t be a problem, there a people with hundreds of automations.
This depends on the type of devices, i have well over 100 physical devices integrated and it was running fine on the Pi. I moved to a NUC i3 a while ago, because I love to tinker around, have some Test HA VMs and also have some other services not related to HA that I want to run from the same device.
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I have a fair amount of devices (50+) and eight rstp streams running through HA. On top of all that, I had containers for openzwave, deconz, glances, esphome, node-red, and frigate. I ran everything but frigate on one Pi4, then dedicated a second Pi4 just to frigate. It worked, but my motion based lighting automations starting to lag a bit. Over time with each new device add, I found myself getting farther and farther into a room before the lights came on.
I too love to tinker and had already switched over to running home assistant container, so I started looking for some new hardware to step things up. I ended up going with an HP Elitedesk 800 G1 in an ultraslim desktop form factor (they come in SFF and go all the way down to micro). The USDT form factor seemed to be the best of both worlds in that it is tiny and quiet, but it is loaded with ports and has more horsepower for a given price range.
I scored one on eBay in perfect shape with an Intel i5-4690S, 8gb ram, and a 128gb SSD for $120 shipped. I loaded up a copy of Ubuntu server and have it set up headless in a closet. I moved all containers over to it, including frigate, and it handles it all like a champ, with plenty of headroom for more. My automations are noticeably snappier and the Lovelace dashboards load faster. It was a steep learning curve for someone with zero experience with this kind of stuff, but running HA in docker let’s me use the server for more than just HA stuff. Like nextcloud, cups, and other stuff not supported in HAOS.
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As @andynbaker reviewed, there are a number of small form factor intel and amd units available on the refurb channels. I run Ubuntu 20 on an old Mac Mini 2012 i7 with 16 gb, SSD and GTX 1070 attached to firewire 2 for my HA Docker based system. It was solid from initial install of Ubuntu 20. No messing around. There is so much to learn and do just around core Home Assistant stuff, I am very happy I am not diddling around with Raspberry Pi issues. I do do have RPI’s both 3 and 4 around in my environment. And I do think that once the RPI 4 compute module starts to get some supporting items like M2 boot disks, it will be a great platform. But I am thinking that is around 8 to 16 months out for a solid solution. Till then if you can get HA running in Docker or VM under Ubuntu on a small form factor HP, Lenovo or Apple you will be a happy camper. And if you want to move your HA to a RPi 4 compute in the future that small form factor into or AMD box will be a good headless workhorse for well into the future. – Good Hunting
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Hi,
I was exactly asking the same question… in this post:
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/raspberry-pi-4b-case-with-ssd-support/243229/6
and considering this kind of cheap NUC:
https://www.banggood.com/Beelink-GK55-Intel-Gemini-Lake-R-J4125-Quad-Core-DDR-8GB-RAM-SSD-256GB-ROM-5_8G-Wifi-bluetooth-4_0-Windows-10-4K-60-at-fps-Mini-PC-p-1739027.html?rmmds=search&ID=47184&cur_warehouse=HK
My only concern is that it should consume much more power that the RPI4 with SSD no ?
Thank you all guys for the exhaustive replies. Since I don’t think it is worth be forced to upgrade hardware every once in a while I will search for some middle-end Computers’s offers on ebay or similar, that seem to be cheaper than NUC and more performant at that price.
Since most of these containers we run seem to tax the processor the most, be sure to use a website like passmark or wherever it’s called now to compare the different CPUs you find in your eBay hunt. There seem to be just a few major players in the used ultra small form factor market (HP, Dell, Lenovo), and most of these seem to be recycled from previous lives in the business sector; so most seem to be similarly spec’d. But even in that crowd I found a few had newer, faster processors compared to others, even under the same model name. I ended up with an i5-4690S vs the more common i5-4570S or i5-4590T. The 4690S draws slightly more power, but seemed to score higher than the other two in terms of computer power.
And don’t forget those ports. I’m running a conbee stick and needed something with USB 2.0, but many of the micro PC’s only had 3.0.
So I keep MySQL database and other IO heavy stuff on a NUC with SSD.
Why not run HA on the NUC too?
3 reasons:
- Fiddling with containers is fun but takes much time. I tried python installation and container installation years ago. Now I prefer letting my HA sitting there for a year without need for maintenance.
- Running HA on a dedicated machine allows it to upgrade the OS by itself without interrupting any services on my NUC.
- For the points above, I need a dedicated machine for HA. I happen to have a RPi and a NUC, That is it. When I have another computer retired, I might retire the RPi and move HA to my NUC.
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Exactly my thoughts. I enjoyed reading haakonstorm’s post, but maaaan… three raspberry PIs / SBCs running Kubernetes?
HA isn’t that demanding a platform so upgrading to a NUC seems the way forward to me.