I currently run HA in a VM on Unraid, supervised w/Node Red. It works great, but part of me wants to put it on its own dedicated hardware to make sure its up and running even when I am messing around with and eventually breaking something on Unraid.
Looking through I see a number of posts, but nothing super recent regarding sff PCs vs Pi etc.
I’m looking at a Lenovo ThinkCentre M53 2.41GHz Pentium J2900 (4C4T w/10W TDP), 4GB RAM, 240gb SSD, about $70 all in.
My question to you is, what would you recommend here? I do not want to step down to a Pi4 and I want to go with a “NUC” style pc with a low TDP. I saw one post speaking highly of the J2900. 4GB should be enough ram but is that CPU going to hold out long enough to make it worth it? Should I look at something newer, bear in mind I would love to keep my TDP below 15 and have this draw very little.
Edit: For those who have Home Assistant blue what are your thoughts/experiences? I could be convinced to go this route if there isn’t a performance loss from a VM to it like there would be VM to Pi4.
Current setup:
Home assistant VM on Unraid, Supervisor & HACS, Node Red, ESPHome (6 devices, this will grow significantly in the future) GoControl CECOMINOD016164 HUSBZB-1 USB Hub w/ 15ish Zigbee devices, Visual Studio Code, Snapshots plugin to backup to GDrive. Grafana and InfluxDB may be added to the mix at a later date.
Additionally I was wondering for those who use Hass OS what your image backup system looks like? Currently I use the VM backup Plugin on Unraid in addition to snapshots within the VM and backups of snapshots to GDrive.
Would love to hear thoughts, thanks!