I’m sure there are lots of people in the same situation.
For me, I want one HDD for my OS and a secondary 4TB NVMe to store all my Frigate recordings.
I was previously running Proxmox with a Home Assistant VM and a separate Blue Iris VM for surveillance — which was using 140 kWh per month. Overkill! Now I’ve switched to running just Home Assistant OS on a Dell Optiplex micro.
All I want is a simple way to mount my secondary drive so I can point Frigate to it and store everything there.
The drive shows up when running ha hardware info, but it’s not visible in the GUI — under Settings → Storage you only see your OS drive, so there’s no way to manage it there.
I’ve tried Advanced SSH with a public key. whoami shows root, but trying to mount the drive always gives “permission denied (are you root?)”.
There doesn’t seem to be a workaround for this.
I understand the devs want a locked-down Linux for HA, but surely something like this is in demand, right? Or is it just me?
I probably should’ve clarified that a bit better. Sorry for the confusion. I wasn’t running proxmox on the optiplex prior… I bought the optiplex for home assistant + frigate.
I run Proxmox on a server with a number of other VMs as well, including TrueNAS for network storage — it’s a pretty beefy server setup, hardware wise…Even with just HA and Blue Iris running, there’s still a fair bit of power draw having it on 24/7.
Now I’ve moved HA over to the Optiplex and switched to Frigate for simplicity. That alone has dropped power usage a lot. The server still gets used, but only when I actually need it — not running all the time anymore.
I’m actually happy running HAOS natively — that part’s working great. My only issue is… why is mounting a secondary HDD to HA so difficult as mentioned in my op.
Because HA isn’t meant to run as a NAS let alone a NVR. HA is built to run your house, which typically doesn’t require a secondary hard drive. HA has built in options to connect to a remote NAS, in settings → system → storage.
Frigate is a custom application, custom integration, and has no official affiliation with HA. Frigate could build something to use HA’s additional storage options. I’m not sure if they have.
Your problem is not unique and is a bit of an unnecessary pain.
Mounting multiple drives is native to linux and there shouldn’t be much effort needed, regardless of ‘priority’.
Besides for frigate storage, there is also media and local backup storage needs, that should be supported and available from haos/hass for the user to leverage, and to keep that storage from over-filling the hass data drive.
You can use a secondary drive for HASS data storage, you can access this @ settings > system > storage > move data disk.
I have a 256g boot, and 2tb data ssd’s in a dedicated haos micro pc.
Adding local storage should be a simple, and just use the same dialog/workflow as adding network storage… Just need to auto mount additional drives and add a user selectable local path.
If you are using HAOS, then mounting a drive in there can and usually does lead to a drive that gets into the backup path, and when you have 3tb on the mounted drive and 1tb in the main HA drive where the tmp file for the backup is stored, the drive fills up and it all crashes. (Ask me how I know.)
Yes there are ways. If you use the search here you will find them. In your journey you will hopefully learn enough how to avoid problems like I mentioned, so for that reason I don’t hand people the link, rather let them find it.
Now I’ve switched to running just Home Assistant OS on a Dell Optiplex micro.
