I too had stability issues when I first wanted to get into HA. I’ve tried two different RPI versions and different memory cards and stability was horrible in all cases. Making matters worse, seemingly after each crash, I had to completely reinstall the OS and the application.
I’m sure I’ll take a beating for sharing my negative experience but I eventually gave up on it and found a tutorial that showed how to install it on my NAS. I truly commend those who can make it work.
Just to share the pain, I have one 3B+ and two Zero W’s. All three of them die every few days - and when I say die, I mean the light is on but nobody is home. I can SSH to them, but get no password prompt.
I monitor a heartbeat on them, and twice now all three have died within the same 5 minute window. Suspiciously sounds power related at a house-level. The house is 120 years old, but hopefully the wiring isn’t. All have different SD cards that are class 10 or better. I’m using decent power supplies, but not the official one.
The 3B+ is running HA (not my main HA, which is on a VM), and the Zero’s are only running the monitor script for presence detection. My cunning plan was to send them a reboot every day to see if that improves matters - which would imply something like a memory leak rather than power fluctuation, but you’ve got to start somewhere.
Same, same…
[quote=“punkin, post:21, topic:89732”]
ound a tutorial that showed how to install it on my NAS…[/quote]
Would you have a link to that?
That is what I’m afraid of. Spending more and more $$$ chasing stability for no return.
SD card completely dead. That’s three SD cards now. I might give openHAB a try on my Mac.
Keep in mind, I’m no pro at this but this was by far a simpler set up for me any my little ZWave network. Once it was installed and operational, the only thing I’ve done is update the versions as they were released and tinker around with the config files while trying new things out.
I had issues with my first raspberry pi years ago and once I ditched the SD card it was fine. Though I will say I would not run hass on a pi. I value my sanity too much. 
I ran HA on a Pi with a canakit power supply using the same regular class 10 SD card for a year before I switched to a NUC. I’m actually still using it to run my zigbee network on because I was having issues with the USB stick on the NUC. It’s still running rock solid.
Why don’t you give home assistant a try on your mac?
Maybe I should. I didn’t realise that was an option.
It is right there in the docs. It does pay to read them. That won’t change if you switch to openHAB.
The problem with the PIs are the SD cards. SD cards are really designed as temporary storage for things like digital camera, and not as a permanent storage device for PC. The reason for this is that there is a lot of I/O (input-output) activity when an operating system is installed on a storage device, and SD cards aren’t really geared for a lot of I/O for a long period of time. If you use an SSD or and HDD, you’ll get better longevity and performance.
Also, another thing I don’t like about PIs is the static RAM memory (no ability to upgrade) PI3’s have 1GB of RAM, which is kind of pushing the threshold as to how much HA needs. My PI3 B+ is running a test instance of HA and it is sooooooo slow compared to my VM/Ubuntu setup with 3GBs of RAM. I can tell that 1GB is barely enough because it pages the SD card so much, which is more I/O activity. If you could somehow upgrade the memory on the PI to about 1.5 or 2 GB, this would decrease the paging, increase performance, and increase the longevity of the SD card.
I’ve down that, but there is no Hass.io section on the menu, so I can’t restore my previous snapshot (or the hass.io components).
You realise that hassio is not the same as home assistant?
No I did not.
OK sorry that is probably a barrier to understanding.
Try this https://www.home-assistant.io/faq/#home-assistant-vs-hassio
It’s not the software causing your problems… Maybe Openhab is less hard on resources… I don’t know but if you are having issues with a Pi it’s either the SD-Card or the Power Supply. HA/Hass.io is perfectly stable and reliable with the right hardware on a Pi. Blame Hass.io or HA all you like but it is your hardware, not the software.
HA developers should make a more clearer distinction between the different installs.
HassOS
Difficulty - easy- All-in-one operating system and HassIO install (very minimal to no ability to manage the OS as it is part of the system). Pretty much everything is done on the GUI.
HassIO
Difficulty - medium - is HA with an easier to administer GUI. Needs a host operating system like Linux, Mac or Windows. Ability to control OS and add components separately from HA, but most of the management is done through the GUI (example, addons, snapshots, etc)
Home Assistant
Difficulty - Hard- Needs a host operating system. No Hassio, or the ability to install add-ons components through the GUI. Most administrative tasks are done through command lines. Allows for more control over the installation and installing components separately from HA in docker containers, but requires a lot of command line knowledge.
But why blame HA for something that is most likely hardware problems??