Hi Team,
I’m just about to head down this rabbit hole of home automation.
I have a choice of 2 machines to install home assistant on.
I would like some advice as to which one you would choose.
My available systems are
It is completely dependent on what you intend to run on the machine. It ultimately comes down to how you will use your machine. Either of the 2 machines you have listed are overkill for running HA.
There are literally dozens of these types of threads on the forums with people asking this same question and others offering suggestions and reason why you should choose one way or another, maybe have a search for similar threads to get some ideas.
They’re both 4 cores with 4 threads available. The Pentium clock is a hair faster. The NUC would take up less space and be a bit more power efficient.
Both would run HA well.
That’s about all I can think of that might sway you one way.
There are a number of ways to go depending on what else you want. If you’re thinking of using video cameras in your system, you’ll likely want another program to manage the cameras. I’m using Blue Iris on my system, which means the computer runs Windows (for Blue Iris) and runs HA in VirtualBox.
That still works well on my i5 system of about the same vintage as yours.
i would have chosen the laptop, you have keyboard, monitor and most likely build-in Bluetooth, and more than sufficient performance, as mentioned above, the NUC is better for “other purposes”
Switching from a Raspberry Pi3 to a NUC i3 for Home Assistant, and only for Home Assistant, has been a very pleasant decision here.
Since I am running nothing else on the NUC, there is no possible conflicts or confusing Docker commands. And if the whole system crashes and burns, I don’t have layers of restores to contend with.
Backups: I am using the Samba Backup that saves a nightly snapshot of my Home Assistant to an NAS (incidentally on another NUC). In the worst case, I can flash HAOS on the NUC SSD then restore from the snapshot in about two hours.
HA Restart and server reboot only take 10 to 20 seconds compared to up to a full minute or more on the Raspberry.
I also use Node Red, mostly for my Alexa inputs, and a deploy only takes a few seconds.