Long time user of HA, first on rpi3 and later on rpi4 (current setup). I’m moving to a new house so I’d like to re-evaluate whether my current setup is in need of an upgrade.
Currently I’m using an rpi4 booting from the sd card and using an external usb connected SSD drtive for most of the I/O.
I really would like to get rid of the sd card alltogether because I know it’s rather WHEN than IF it is going to fail at some point in the future. Same thing for the SSD drive as I had one fail already after 2 years.
What’s the recommended setup? An Rpi5 with NVMe ssd drive? I haven’t looked into booting directly from the SSD for the pi5, when I got the pi4 it was not possible yet to boot from usb (yes it’s possible now but I’d rather not touch it at the moment).
Perhaps something entirely different than an rpi5 is also possible (back in the day I saw a lot of people with Intel NUCs), what’s your setup or your recommendation?
A N100-type mini pc. You can get them for about €150 on ali with 16 Gb ram and 512 Gb SSD. If you count the price of a 8 Gb Pi5, a case, power supply and NVMe ssd drive, you won’t be much less.
+1 for @francisp’s suggestion above. Get a cheap mini PC or a used laptop, throw in proxmox and you’ll be able to run whatever you want next to HA on that puppy.
+1. I had the same choice, went for the NUC, haven’t regretted it since. Price wise they cost the same if you add the case, cooling, ssd hat, ssd and power supply. The NUC runs way faster than my previous RPI4 and with lower CPU%. If you look around a bit you can get nice deals.
What’s, according to you, the advantage of using Proxmox over a native Debian/Ubuntu install?
I haven’t used proxmox before, looks interesting if you want multiple instances of Linux in parallel though for me it would just be HA and a few daemons, is it still useful then?
I guess you would run HAOS in a separate linux instance rather than using Docker to containerize everything?
I use old pc that i upgraded a bit. Bought used nvida gpu, google coral and [this]https://a.aliexpress.com/_EwHSa31). I run debian and ha in docker. I also bought a new ram 32 GB. You can do a lot with old pc and some upgrades to it.
Greatest advantage for me is ease of installation. Tteck’s scripts make setting up a new lxc as simple as copy pasting a single line of code.
Then, there’s compartmentalization. Want a standalone Z2MQTT instance which keeps running if HA is dead? No problem
After that, there’s the flexibility. Wanna run Linux AND windows at the same time? You can.
Best of all, there’s the backups. If you hose your config or an update goes wrong, you’re a click or 2 away from restoring everything back to the way it was.
I can see the value in the easy backups. I am currently using Docker and when HA dies, zigbee2mqtt, mariadb etc happily continue running in their own container.
Just for fun I’ll try proxmox with HAOS so I can use its add-on features as well as easy updates, and have another debian instance running for my tinkering stuff. Who wants to voluntarily run Windows right?
Backups are easily done in container based installation. I use duplicati as system service. You can configure it to send e mails on backup results. Restoring backup is easy as click and restore, I can’t see it an easier than that. I also want to run my local cloud to sync my devices and do backup on synced files. You can also run windows in docker if you want. I try it, it works and deleted container as I don’t use windows on any of my personal computers. Just using space and resources for nothing.
