What is your experience with the reliability of Raspberry Pis, especially the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B? Is it reliable enough to run a smart home without hiccups, days of downtime, or hours of repairs? Because:
I installed Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 4B with 8 GB of RAM. After a year, I had problems restarting it after HA updates. I thought one of the updates had crashed the software installation. However, the green LED flashed eight times, indicating that no bootloader was found. I reinstalled HAOS on the SD card, restarted the Raspberry Pi, and it loaded HA, so I could upload my last backup. However, the subsequent restarts failed again. I found that when I plugged in the SD card and jiggled it, the Raspberry Pi would reboot, but fail on the next reboot. I tried installing HAOS on an external USB SSD. Sometimes it booted the OS, but not always. Sometimes, blue or magenta blocks appeared on the screen, and there were also sudden reboots. I then tried a USB memory stick, thinking the SSD might be drawing too much power. However, the stick was too slow, and the Raspberry Pi showed all the other symptoms.
Resoldering the critical solder joints, as suggested in the forums for this case, was out of the question. I took an identical Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8 GB that I had earmarked for another project. I reinstalled HAOS, backups, etc., all with the aforementioned USB SSD. Most of the sensors were reconnected, especially the ZigBee sensors. However, the Bluetooth sensors that the old Raspi could still connect to were now inaccessible to the new one. I had difficulty with non-Zigbee Tuya devices. However, the connection with the Nabu Cloud was immediately re-established, including with Alexa.