You are part of a very small percentage of (vocal) users though.
You keep saying you burned 3 cards but no details about what the cards are. Did you just reuse the same card 3 times? are the 3 cards all the same type. You can put your fingers in your ears and scream ‘not listening’ as long as you like but the issue is either the card or the power supply. It could of course be a faulty Pi but that is incredibly unlikely.
Three seperate cards, none of which now work for any application. 1 x SanDisk Ultra 64g, 1 x SanDisk Extreme 64g and 1 x Verbatim Premium 32g.
Perhaps the “very small percentage of (vocal) users” are signalling an issue the developers should be paying attention to.
you won’t fix crap hardware with software.
I and others have had poor experiences with SanDisk. Don’t know about verbatim. Maybe take a look at some of the webcam forums and see what kinds of cards they are recommending there. I would still say your issues are with your card or the Power supply. Seems odd that 3 cards are failing…
Have you tried MiniToolPartitionWizard on the cards? You should be able to bring them back to life and use them for some other application. It’s the database writes that kill the cards with Home Assistant.
I still think you should try a Samsung EVO or a better high-endurance card.
Thanks for the advice, I am on a Mac. I’ve tried the Disk Utility that comes with the Mac and an app called SD card formatter. Neither of which can read any of the cards, much less do anything with them.
I appreciate your advice and I’ll keep that in mind should I purchase another card, but right now I am reluctant to do that for fear of burning another card.
The negativity and your willingness to fault the project is unreal. As many people here have mentioned, there are dozens of things that could be at play in your SD cards getting nuked. Blaming HA for it with little to no testing and calling it unstable based on your own short experience is unfair and unreasonable. I’ve been running HA on a Raspberry Pi for over a year now and have had absolutely zero issues with stability or SD card destruction.
No it isn’t. It’s not unreal. I can tell you that it is absolutely real. This actually did happen. I have nothing to gain from fabricating a story about this. Four installs from scratch following three dead SD cards before I’ve managed to get the system to actually function in any meaningful way. It’s not unreal, it’s actually very real, I wish that it wasn’t, but it is. That is the reality, you may not like it, but it is real.
Actually, it’s almost that easy 
I basically used rpi-clone to create a fully bootable clone (duh!) of my SD-Card on an SSD for testing purposes.
I couldn’t use this simple approach it in the end because I’d made it difficult for myself and got rid of my original NOOBS partitions along the way. But it would have worked just fine.
No question that people have experienced stability issues when using a Raspberry Pi … regardless of what’s running on it. An RPi doesn’t need to run Home Assistant or openHAB to experience problems. Just look through the Raspberry Pi’s community forum for examples of that. In fact, the causes for instability were first raised, and resolved, by the RPi community.
… but maybe I’ll burn another three SD cards. I could get another power supply, but I’m already using the official supply (as recommended).
Think about what you did here. You replaced three SD cards in short order yet never questioned the integrity of the power supply. In fact, you’re still defending it because it’s the “official supply”. Perhaps it’s a defective official supply?
The costs of that quickly escalate, with no real reason for me to expect a stable system will come out of that.
I can’t speak for your situation but I’ve purchased official RPi power supplies for CDN$11 and a 16GB microSD card set me back CDN$10. If you consider these costs to be prohibitive, I recommend you stop what you’re doing and quit home automation. This hobby only gets more expensive. Plus spending time and money to test/fix things is often part of the landscape (especially your time when you hitch your wagon to an open-source home automation software like openHAB or Home Assistant).
It would be better if the developers could perhaps look at a system that boots the pi from an SD card and operates from a usb stick or ssd drive, as openHAS seems to be able to do.
This ability is completely separate from the home automation software (whether Home Assistant or openHAB or something else). Also, it’s convenience feature found in the openHABian version of openHAB (a shell script called by openhabian-config) and not an innate ability of openHAB.
I just do not have confidence in the ‘HA on the Pi’ concept as it currently exists.
Based on what you’ve experienced, I don’t doubt it; I’d feel the same way as well. After doing some research, I’d learn that it had nothing to do with Home Assistant and everything to do with providing the RPi with a clean, uninterrupted supply of at least 5.1 VDC and 2.5 Amps. Given that I had just lost three SD cards, from different vendors, I’d become suspicious of the power supply and replace it with another. If that didn’t fix it, rather than replace the RPi, I’d just choose a speedier platform. But that’s me.
FWIW, I run Home Assistant on a (free) ten-year old netbook.
Thanks for your detailed response. Based the intermittent uptime I have had with it, I actually quite liked HA / Hassio. I particularly liked its flexibility and ease of configuration.
I get what you’re saying about the cost of SD cards, but it would appear they are much cheaper for you than they are for me. Particularly at the rate I am burning through them.
I think running HA on a different HW platform might be the way to go sometime in the future. Thanks.
As I said earlier, do you have an old PC you no longer think is up to being a desktop? It can you but one off eBay or Craig’s list or whatever?
A nice low power machine like a nuc is nice, but any old PC should do.
I think you are entirely, completely and utterly missing the point that many, many people have tried to make in this thread.
The problems you are experiencing are not the fault of the HA software! It’s not HA’s fault!
If you want to give up and move on I understand that you have to do what you think is best for you. But don’t act as if it’s the dev’s error in selecting the RPi as the default introductory platform.
As many have told you already, for the great majority of people (including me) the RPi has been a stable hardware platform (if a little slow on reloads/reboots).
The thread is now over 70 posts long trying to help you to fix a problem you wanted help with to help you keep on using software you say you like. Advice has been given over and over and rejected as many times. I’m not sure what else you want us to say.
Please don’t shout at people on the forums.
Who’s shouting? 
You were. ALLCAPS is shouting and inappropriate here.
Dude, chill…
Some random “king of the internet” at some unknown time in the past made up some arbitrary association between ALLCAPS and shouting that I forgot about. I fixed it and I made a little joke about it. Hence the …
Is there anything else I need to do to pay penance for my indiscretion?
Besides, quit shouting “ALLCAPS” at me! 
Fair enough, I didn’t see the smilies before I reacted.
I don’t think I’ve said that. I have been talking specifically about the HA on PI implementation. As I’ve said, I do like it as a software. I like its interface and flexibility. Just not on a PI, given my own experience.
I think I’ll look at different hardware options at some later stage as has been suggested by many on this thread.
Yeah, cool. I’ll look into that at some later stage. I’d like to understand how to install and configure it on a PC like and NUC, hopefully with hass.io. I don’t know much (or anything about the docker thing). I’ll read up sometime down the track. Thanks for the suggestion.
I know. That’s what I was talking about, too.
The software is not the cause of your woes on the RPi. It really, really isn’t. It’s something else. Running HA on an SD card on a RPi will not kill an SD card in a short time.
@currest2620 I have just recently changed to using a NUC, but, have been using HA for about 18mths now at home, on an RPI3, and have only killed 1 card - a San Disk. Changed to Samsung EVO, and a good quality 3 amp PSU, no issues since. My reason for changing to a NUC was nothing to do with HA or stability problems, more my own want to have something shiny and new.
I also have HA running at my parents house, and my business. All running on RPI3’s with EVO SD cards, 3 amp PSU’s. Never had an issue with them. Your issue, as has been mentioned a number of times in not with HA, it is most likely your power supply.
Before blaming the software so quickly, purchase a good quality SD card, and a good quality 3 amp PSU, and start again.
Once you have things up and running, take a snap shot of HA and back it up so if you have a future failure, you can easily restore it in 2 mins.
I would also suggest that you use a UPS for you RPI. SD cards in RPI’s HATE losing power, even for a split second. Always reboot using SSH, or HA. Never pull the power cord.