What is the best, safest hardware to run Home Assistant for the long haul?

Hardware
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Hello

I am running Hass.io on my raspberry pi3 for some time now, quite happy with it when everything works fine, but I am now sick of the hardware failure I encounter from time to time. resulting in a unwanted, always-at-the-worst-time maintainance (reinstall/restore/deal with all the small details that broke). And of course, the WAF is very bad for that.

Today I had my UPS (Eaton Ellipse Pro) that shut down for no reason, and my entier bay when out. My NAS does not like these shutdown, I know I will have 1 or 2 days of RAID repair, but at end it will work. The other device will just boot and restore their state.
But Hass just died. The SD card is now corrupted, I have to restore and reinstall everything. I am really piss off this situation, it is not something I can accept.

I can buy another kind of device for a few buck more this RPi3, if it will not suffer from the same design flaw (it is a design flaw, for me). I tried several kind of small UPS hat on my Rpi3, but either they are too bulky to find a box, either the box does not provide access to the right buttons, there are 2 reset buttons (one for the card, one for the Rpi. which other device you know has 2 reset buttons???), either the software is hard to put on Hassio and require quite some investment I do not have anymore (newborn stuff, you can imagine).

But still, I can’t understand why there isn’t a simple, solution, that would be buyable. Something Home Assistant can even sell, I would buy it happily. We see companies that repack a Rpi or alike and sell it, I am sure these products do not died on the first electrical failure (like the jeemdom pro).

So what are your solution? Rpi + the right hat + the right box ? Which one ? Nuc? Odroid? I am looking for something I can install hass.io safely on it, and it won’t die when the power cuts suddently
Thanks

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Best is personal, but a Pi is about the worst :wink: SD cards die, the only question is how soon.

However, there’s a list of directly supported hardware, or you can run in a VM on any hardware.

Personally, I’d use an old/second hand laptop with a working battery. Having a built in UPS is handy.

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Hi,
I second the recommendation of @Tinkerer made. While not as inexpensive as a Pi it is a much more robust solution. I have been running mine on an old laptop for over a year and even through several power failures.
Another more expensive solution is to use a second hand PC and an external ups. In either case go with Debian as the base OS as this is officially supported.
There is an official way to run a Pi4 from an ssd but you will still be relying on your external ups being reliable.
hope that helps?

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I “recently” replaced my RPI with a NUC. Meant to replace the RPI for a long time but was always put off by the fact that it ran z-wave with a daughter board, making the transition painful. I also prioritised how to run HA long term and stable when I transitioned and landed on some simple principles:

  1. Use Hassio so you get the supervisor
  2. Single-purposed hardware. I wanted a box that just did HA so I never get into a scenario where it needs restarts or modifications due to other programs.
  3. 10x the requirements. HA needs little resources, but in order to be future proof by a long shot, get something way more powerful than the real need. The cost doesn’t add up to much and ideally this box can run for many years without replacement.
  4. Stay away from Hassio addons, as a general rule. Try to run all connected services on a different box, meaning set up a server with containers or virtualisation for other servers/dbs. I have a ubuntu server running influxdb, grafana, zwave2mqtt, mariadb, unifi controller, mqtt, plex. I can experiment with removing/adding services here without worrying about the HA box. i DO run some addons, its not set in stone, but its the second choice.

To be specific:

  1. Get a NUC. The cheapest you can get will most likely suffice for years if you don’t want to run addons. Form factor makes them placement friendly.
  2. Get a server (can be anything really). Use docker or something else to run dbs etc.
  3. Consider a UPS for both

When you are out of capacity you can upgrade the server with disk/cpu/memory or add another, but as you don’t run an increasing number of addons on the NUC it should just chug happily along serving you HA for years.

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Hi, thanks for you answer. This kind of confirm my thought that I need to upgrade from Raspberry to NUC. I would still like to run OpenZWave addon on it (I am running the new beta addon, works pretty fine even if it could be much better, maybe later.

I’ll give a try to a passive NUC with a bit of memory and an SSD on it.

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If long haul, then you need enterprise grade hardware. Doesn’t need to be expensive at all. Off lease xServers, etc. A simple 1U or tower IBM server off lease will run FOREVER. Get one with hot swap HDs and redundant power supplies, buy a few extra parts and you’re into it for a few hundred dollars and have hardware that will still be running 20 years from now with parts that are dirt cheap. And virtualize. Run HA as a VM so that in the off chance of a catastrophic hardware failure, you can simply move the VM to a new physical box.

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So, finally I switched to a Celeron NUC (the cheapest I found on Amazon, NUC7CJYH), + SSD (industrial, because) + 8 Gb RAM.
Installed on a custom Ubuntu 20.04 and the hassio supervised install script. Migration was quite simple, the snapshot was easily restored (only missing it the ability to upload an archive).

I moved the MariaDB database to this NUC, and I have a couple of hassio addons (zwave2mqtt, mariadb, mqtt, visualstudio, NUT, portainer) running so far it does not seem to be overloaded. But it works great, boot is pretty fast, the power management is (at least !!!) satisfactory.

Thanks for your recommendation.

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Hi all, I have an idea I would like to check with you all . . . I run OpenMediaVault which has Docker installed and all containers are on the raid set.

Debian can be run in a docker (https://hub.docker.com/_/debian)

Can any see any reason NOT to spin up a Debian container that is setup the run the supervisor mode of HA in that?

Has anyone done this and mind sharing any resources of how and any potential problems (ie rerouting a usb zwave through a docker host OS then into HA container).

My gut feeling is that this is easiest way to get the benefits of full supervisor HA and Docker to give and easy, portable, swarmable solution?

I am running docker HA, and a docker MQTT and a docker NodeRed etc etc. I took me weeks of reading and Dr Zzz etc videos to get there and I am truely fearful of ever having to go through that again. I listen to the HA podcast and Self-Hosted and jealous of their supervisor mode which I cannot have running HAs standard docker.

I don’t understand why there is not standard docker with supervisor in it already. If the goal is to make Docker easy for everyone then surely only the 2 best methods are:

  1. The SOC hassio build or
  2. Containerized build with Supervisor built in

I believe that the add ons on hassio are basically dockers images managed by the Supervisor but I am sure I have read about Docker OS containers runner Docker images in them.

I started on the RPi route and LOVED the simplicity of the Superviser but moved to my raid server after losing the SD Card a few times. SD cards are just not a reliable media to run HA on as many have alluded to here on this forum.

I like the old laptop idea but again it’s not transferable. And old laptop is likely to die and then what, find new hardware, new Linux build, new HA, upload config etc etc

Imagine the same problem but with a complete HA Docker container with Supervisor . . link any computer in the house running docker to your config file and spin up again . . . 2mins for recovery. Or even better, swarm your families computers and let which ever one that can, simply take over, so zero down time! Much better than telling the family the lights in the house will not work until Daddy can source another cheap laptop.

Maybe I am missing something and maybe there already IS this kind of solution but I have not found it yet and would much appreciate a link to it :wink:

I feel this is the biggest barrier to HA really owing the market and would look forward to no longer hearing how people lost their installations on podcasts :wink:

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Is this still true when an ssd is used? I like how efficient my pi is, but I guess with a 275W poe switch right next to it I don’t have to be so frugal. However, I always thought since I’m running an ssd the sd card would last about forever (only accessed breifly at bootup right?)

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Well, an SSD isn’t an SD card, now is it :wink:

However, the Pi is still generally quite underpowered. The Pi4 not so much, and it’s actually more powerful than the (very) bottom end Intel chips.

That really depends on the setup. If the SD card just holds your /boot partition it’ll last a very long time. If it holds the entire OS, not so much.

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With the latest version of Rpi4 I was even able to boot from SSD so no longer dependant on SD card.
I started a year ago using HA on the Pi (without the SSD) but had some major issues. Can HA supervisor run without the full iso? I mean, can I install it on my exisiting Pi and still use the Domoticz that is currently running?

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No, if you want the Supervisor then you don’t get to install other software.

You don’t need the Supervisor though.

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TBH, for me supervised runs great under ubuntu linux, but I know how to handle this. And I run also other software on the server like samba, snapcast client, ledfx natively on the server and other services like librespot or snapserver as docker containers and a windows VM with qemu/kvm running my backup utility server.
In theory, any debian based distro should work fine for it, before i used ubuntu, i used manjaro and had also no problems.