Replacement hardware to run Home Assistant

Hi,

After 3 years running HA on a Pi 4B, it seems to have a problem as its been crashing multiple times a day for about the last year. There is never anything definitive in the logs and disabling all the integrations alternately has had no effect so I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to replace it. With Pi 4s not available for months here, its probably worth upgrading the hardware, especially as my Synology DS 416j could really do with replacing. The NAS is only really used for backups and running a few cameras on Surveillance Station, but I’d probably also add an Omada controller if I could.

The 2 options I’m considering are whether to replace both with a NUC running NAS software or buy a new NAS. I don’t have any experience running anything in Docker containers or with VMs, but am happy to give things a go. I’ve done plenty of searching and can’t come to a decision as to which of these would be the best option for my needs. Any thoughts and what sort of spec of replacement I need would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Guyan

Have you tried a new SD card? How is the power supply?

Sorry. Meant to include that detail in the original post. I’m running it from a USB SSD in an ArgonOne V2 case using the supplied power supply. I’ve tried other power supplies and these haven’t improved the situation.

I run my system on a cheap refurbished AMD computer that cost ~400 USD. I run as a VM and it works very well. Had a supermicro 1/2 rack server that was 15 years old prior to that and it ran for 5 years with home assistant. HA has run on the AMD for about 2 1/2 years now without any issues. I have solar and batteries so I have UPS for the whole house and I have surge protectors at the panel and subpanels to handle internal and external surges.

Hope this helps

I tend to go for laptops with the Intel Pentium Silver or Gold CPUs.
They are low power, so usually a fanless laptop and the battery will then work as a built-in UPS.

This is a new one and it is less than $300, which means if someone has one with a broken monitor, then it costs too much to repair compared to just buy a new one, so they can often be bought really cheap.

I just moved my instance to a hp elitedesk 800 g2. I picked it up on eBay for US $60. It has 8GB ram and a 500GB SSD. it is very quiet and I am only using about 3% of the processor and 15% of memory, and that is with about 10 addons running. There are a bunch of these out there.

2 Likes

Glad to see your post as I came to the forums today to look for alternative hardware recommendations. I’m also running HA on a Pi 4B with an Argon case; I have an M.2 SSD in the case. After an unplanned power outage, my system has become unstable and I’m not sure how best to start troubleshooting it. Maybe a new SD card will do the trick.

I also have a Synology NAS (a newer one) and I would suggest trying to keep that as vanilla as possible. It’s pretty hard to go past the Pis for frequently updated HA devices, but I feel like if I were to replace the Pi, I would go with a NUC.

Interested to see what other responses you may get.

In case anyone has a similar problem and stumbles across this, I went back to running Home Assistant from an SD card try and see if there was a problem with the SSD. This worked without the crashes, so I backed up, reinstalled Home Assistant on the SSD and restored. Problem solved!

Ultimately, I went down the route of Unraid on a custom built machine to meet all my requirements.