I had the same issue and only blew 2 SD cards in about 8 months, so I went SSD and so far so good. Mine does a lot more than just HA, but I would always end up with SD cards with read errors. They weren’t cheap either, opted for Samsung Pro or Sandisk Extreme memory cards.
As I was running Raspbian, I just dd’ed my backup image to the SSD, and fixed the boot partition to reference sda instead of mmcblk, and away it went with no issues.
The SSD and caddy ended up not being much more than a good memory card either.
Before anyone asks, Rpi official 2.5A PSU, Line Interactive UPS and milled aluminum heat sink case. No expense spared really. I wouldnt think to look at HA as the issue though, I just know that TBH SD cards are not suited to anything but read only / non-journaling operating systems (e.g. routers, thin clients, etc)
The more I read about running off an SSD instead, the more I think that’s my next move.
A USB>Sata dongle is about £8, A 120gb SSD is about £20. Or on the flip side, a high endurance 64gb SD is £19… I think I’m going to try gambling the extra ~£10 in the hopes I get better stability.
The cheapest NUCs I’ve seen on eBay are around £150, which I can’t gamble I’m afraid.
And as a bonus I get to learn about managing Docker.
I too had problems with SD cards. I was using Microcenter Class 10 cards. The python program I’m running does do frequent writes. I switched to a USB 3.0, EVO Flash and UPS and have been stable ever since. My hardware is RPi3 and OS is Raspbian Stretch. The power comes from a desktop computer style power supply brick via an UPS. I think the CPU brick is rated @ around 30-40amp @ 5Vdc. And Yes, I know that the USB3 is not necessary, but I needed the quality more than the speed. However, I think what was really killing my system was unreliable power and longer write times. The UPS fixed the unreliable power. And booting from a USB Flash was just a secondary precaution.
I think the USB flash and the SD-Card flash is generally the same type of flash anyway so people kid themselves a USB boot is better/more stable. If it’s an SSD that’s a totally different story. Although I did use a USB boot with a USB stick I didn’t notice any speed difference and I never had issues with quality SD-Cards anyway.
Mainly a gamble that I’m able to purchase, set it up and tweak it without my wife asking how much it cost.
If I get better stability from £30 worth of SSD and usb>sata connectors then if she plays up I can say “well the other option was spending 3x this on another computer” and if I don’t get any better stability I have a SSD ready for when/if I get a nuc/mini pc and a usb>sata connector to look through a bunch of old hard drives I have in the study.
Why are people obsessed with NUCs? Any x86 computer will do the trick. Most people have an old machine lying around.
Then when you have a really good system operating, you can say “Hey Mrs Coedy, this home automation system that you love is costing us quite a lot of room and power using this old desktop, how about we save money and space by buying a small low power device?”
That’s true Nick but I don’t have spare space to setup another PC. Of course anything will do the trick but a nuc is not much bigger than a Pi and is low power/high performance bang-for-your-buck. The last thing I need is to set up another PC with it’s footprint.
You do seem to be obsessed with telling people they should just use any old PC though!
I am just trying to ensure people realise that the choice is not rpi|nuc. It’s not, and many people have a suitable computer lying around. And even if they want to buy something small, nuc is one of the more expensive small pc options.
I have a bunch of old PCs laying about, but, wanted the lowest possible TDP I could get, hence choosing a NUC. I get your point about that though. It’s just as easy to use an old PC.
Here is Aussie land, our power costs are huge, I pay 29c/kwh, plus tax, so TDP is important to me.
I am currently running HA on a virtualized instance in Windows Server 2008R2, but am planning on moving to either a NUC or NAS due to the OS becoming EOL soon.
Question for those of you using a NUC; how noisy is the cooling fan during the summer? I plan on placing the new device in a non air-conditioned room, and it will get very warm in the summer months.
I think I’m going with the NUC and run hass.io in a docker. If anyone has recommendations for any particular NUC, disk size, RAM etc, let me know. Thanks for advice so far.
Depends a bit on what you want to run… if you run cameras you might want a higher spec. I just got a Celeron Bundle NUC7CJYH with 8gb RAM (max) and a 240gb SSD. I runn hass.io with 11 addons and I run another 6 or 7 docker containers as well. It’s barely breaking a sweat.
(Oh and uptime is measured in MONTHS. Last restarted when there was a Debian upgrade and I restarted it after installing that and I took the opportunity to update the NUC firmware at the same time)
I installed Debian not Ubuntu as some of the devs convinced me Debian was easier to do a distribution upgrade and was more stable. Happy with that decision but you really can do whatever you want.
