Which platform shall I use

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

Hey there,
currently I am planning my first steps.

I will install the first testsystem as VM on a QNAP NAS.
Bit what´s next ?

a) run it on the QNAP
The NAS runs 365/24/7 but sometimes it is taken down (even for an hour or so) for updates or maintenance and honestly spoken I´d like to have the HA separated from the NAS:

b) HomeAssistant Green

c) Raspi PI
But which one?
I would prefer the Pi5 with 4GB RAM as I can use a SSD via PCIe and not via USB…
But as I need an enclosure, cooling and so on, price is not really lower than HA Green.

So are there any hints or best practice?

What I plan to do:

  • connect a Homematic CCU with about 90 devices
  • some Shelly devices
  • openDTU to collect data of a Hoymiles Solar Inverter
  • some devices viy MQTT
  • some devices via Modbus

Main usecase:.

  • collect and store data of devices (electrical power) and monitur/evaluate them in graphs
  • control the heating
  • collect other measurments and show them in graphs (temp, humidity…)

So the quastion is also: which performance and RAM do I need ?

Basically one question:
Homeassistant runs on an underlying OS.
How is this OS kept up to date?
Or do I have a fault in thinking?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Sven

PS: I am from Germany, so sorry for my english :wink:

2

It boils down to your budget, Homeassistant truly runs great as a VM or standalone. I have experience working with HA as both a VM and standalone, what I wanted was up time, so I went from a VM that needed to restart for particular reasons to a HA OS on a standalone Intel Celeron NUC. The peformance and use are pretty much the same.

Right now there’s about a monthly OS update, or a little longer. It is done via the update feature in HA. Both VM and Standalone have the OS updates.

3

Hey Rodrick,
thanks for the information.
So I think I will go for a tiny PC.

Any hints for a good one?

Regards
Sven

4

Mini PC like a NUC or BEElink, with the ability to use an NVMe, because they are so cheap. You don’t need a lot of CPU power. 8 GB of ram would be good.
My Dual core Celeron 2.8 GHz with 8 GB of RAM and a 120GB NVMe drive is an over kill, handling 32 devices and about 40 automations. I only use about 5% of the CPU, 0.9 GB of ram, and 5GB of hard drive space max.

I can probably get better use of the resources by adding Proxmox and running some additional VMs, but it was cheap so I’m able to dedicate the whole system to HA.

BTW, I initially was trying to get a R-Pi 4, but it was not available, it was easier to get the NUC at about the same price as the R-Pi 4.

1 Like