I am not totally new to HA as I had running on an old laptop right after the Insteon shutdown. I have been using Homeseer & what a mistake that seems to be. I am seriously thinking about starting all over & making the jump to HA. Some of their device support is lacking especially when it comes to Tuya devices. There doesn’t seem to be much community support on their forum. Don’t get me wrong there a few great people who are very dedicated like MnSandler with his Insteon work.
I built a Truenas Core rig which I do plan on migrating over to Truenas Scale. I thought core had support for HA but the plug-in is gone. I have also thought about installing HA on a mini PC such as in the link below. I would probably install linux instead of a windows installation. I have also seen where people have installed HA on a refurbished office mini PC. Not sure if new is better. I am leaning towards the mini PC because it should be simpler. In order for HA to work on my server would I need to purchase a PCIe USB expansion card? For a z-wave & zigbee dongle. I know that I have to purchase a SATA expansion card for VM windows installation in order to have a working CD-Rom drive.
Home Assistant itself does not need a powerful computer - a RasPi 4 runs fine … at least until you add security camera monitoring, voice control or other apps. So really the main question is what do you want to achieve with Home Assistant ? How much grunt will the other apps need ?
I personally upgraded from HAOS on a RasPi 4 to a used micro form factor PC (HP Optiplex 7050) running proxmox and HAOS in a VM (one day I might think of another VM to run on it).
The recommendation (and best support) is to run HAOS (a linux cut down to run Home Assistant Supervisor with docker).
I’m not familiar with TrueNAS, but assume it allows installing from downloaded ISO images; and can expose a USB device (eg zigbee or z-wave coordinator) to a VM - so suggest you check whether extra hardware is required.
Right now I am running Homeseer on a RasPi 4 & it is really slow. Meaning doing anything in the UI is slow. So, yes I could probably repurpose my Homeseer RasPi 4 but then I would be in the same boat. Right now I am running Insteon, Tuya, Z-wave, myQ, & Ecobee. Most of my devices are voice controlled. With HA I plan on running ESP Home & would like to integrate some camera’s but that is down the road. I do realize that HA does not require a whole lot of horse power.
With several integrations I agree with going for more power than a RasPi4
Wow, that’s some serious server hardware you have … I am sure that running HA, etc as VM(s) under TrueNAS would still give you plenty of unused capacity to grow into.
I personally upgraded my HAOS with Rhasspy (voice assistant), MQTT, zigbee, LocalTuya, node-RED but only 23 devices … from a RasPi 4 to a VM under Proxmox on a used business SFF PC. It gave a noticable performance boost to the local voice assistant, but as you can see it is using only a tiny fraction of the machine.
