I am currently running a Raspberry Pi 4 to and want to move everything over to a Beelink S12. The Raspberry Pi is under-powered for what I am using it mainly for (Frigate video surveillance.) I have a 1TB external surveillance HD connected to the Raspberry Pi and I’m running Home Assistant supervised and the Frigate add-on. I also have the following add-ons: DuckDNS, mosquitto broker, NGINX Home Assistant SSL proxy and a few others (Samba Share, etc.) Two main issues: For whatever reason (probably user error,) almost the entire HD is full, even though I am running only (2) 2k cameras, recording 24/7. I only get about 8 days of retention. The other issue is Frigate is telling me that the CPU is very slow (which it is.) Which brings me to wanting to have the same set-up, but on the new Beelink S12. The Beelink S12 has 512 SSD GB, so my concern is, will that be enough for several weeks of video surveillance or should I use the above 1TB external drive to only hold the recordings? With that in mind, it apparently means I have to not use Home Assistant supervised and switch to it being in a container. Apparently, if that is the case, I can’t use add-ons (if I want to have the external HD hold just the video and have everything else running on the SSD the Beelink has.) I’ll admit I’m not super proficient at this stuff, so having the add-ons (and everything already set up) is my preference. If you have any suggestions/input, I’d appreciate it.
I’m not familiar with Beelink … but go for it.
Home Assistant runs on a wide variety of hardware … Raspberry Pi is suggested as a fairly cheap starting point for new users, but it is fairly easy to outgrow it - and video is particularly CPU intensive. An old (or new) X86 PC, on the other hand, allows you to mix and match CPU, RAM, disk to match your individual requirements, and upgrade as necessary.
I strongly recommend using HA OS installation method, as that is the best supported - unless you have some particular reason and expertise for some other approach.
Personally I upgraded to a used Optiplex business PC with i3 processor, and because my requirement is not as CPU intensive as yours I installed HAOS in a proxmox virtual machine. Do a Full Backup in HA on your Raspberry, install HAOS on your new machine, copy the backup file over and restore from backup.
There are plenty of useful threads in the Community Guides and Installation sections of this forum which should help you.
As for recording camera footage, have you done the math ? What is the camera resolution ? Multiply them together to get number of pixels per frame, and by the colour depth. eg an 800x600 image in 16-bit colour = 960KB to transmit or store one frame.
Assuming 30 frames per second, multiply by 30x60x60 to get one hour’s worth of video, say 96GB/hour. Your camera probably has different values, and does some file compression to reduce the size, but this calculation gives you a quick guideline … and it’s always better to estimate on the high side to give you some “wriggle room”.
Alternatively, what are you getting now from your cameras ?
1TB is 1000GB. Divide by 2 cameras and by number of hours in 8 days to find your hourly rate of 2.6GB/hour.
I suggest booting off your SSD, and adding a 2TB or 5TB hard disk for the video footage. The Linux “/etc/fstab” file allows additional hard disks to be linked into the directory structure, and Home Assistant’s “Terminal” does allow /etc/fstab to be edited. What you add to fstab will depend on the hard disk’s UUID and where in the directory structure you want to add the HDD (where it will appear as a new
Appreciate the response. If I go the HAOS route, I can either add to a virtual machine or bare metal, correct? Lots of people talking about Proxmox, so maybe that is the way to go? As far as the add-ons I currently have (listed above,) how will I be able to add these back within HAOS?
Yes, you can install HAOS onto bare metal or in a virtual machine (such as proxmox). It really depends on your level of linux expertise.
- HAOS is designed to be easiest; add-ons are trivial to install and manage.
- proxmox adds another layer to the setup, but once running you are unlikely to notice it unless you are running multiple virtual machines.
- HA Supervised requires that you install and maintain the add-ons yourself, and is really intended for experienced linux developers.
In my case, HA uses only a fraction of the machine, so I thought proxmox would allow me to add other virtual machines … though in 2 years I haven’t found anything else I want to run 
I considered running a NAS as a VM, but decided that sharing a partition via samba (from proxmox CLI) would be adequate for my needs.
There are several HA Add-ons (eg mosquitto MQTT server and Frigate) which can run in separate VMs … but HA already uses Docker “under the hood” to keep add-ons separate (which is almost the same thing) ; and I like the convenience of them all being in the HA control panel.
Video moves quite a lot of data, and I guess over time you are likely to add or upgrade cameras, so if you don’t have other things you want to run in VMs maybe it would be marginally more efficient to run HAOS on bare metal. Alternatively there may be a benefit to running Frigate as a separate VM.
Both proxmox and HAOS are versions of linux, and so provide command line interpreters - though the HAOS version has cut out a lot more of the unnecessary commands. I checked and from HAOS’s Terminal add-on you can edit the /etc/fstab file, which is where you would graft another Hard disk on to the directory tree.