The way most people end up killing cards; exceeding the I/O cycles of the SD card.
If you have a lot of sensors which rapidly change, and are storing these in the logger, and maybe in InfluxDB, you’ll likely find that the SD cards wear out faster than you might expect.
It depends a bit on luck, picking a good “high-quality” SD card, and managing your system to limit excessive writes, but I’ve seen SD cards last anywhere from a few weeks to a few years.
Not for HassOS.
If you really want to do this, install raspbian lite and docker and then a generic linux install for Hass.io. Works great.
I agree that HassOS really should be made USB bootable. Being forced to use a device as unreliable as an SD card for booting and the database is undesirable from the point of view of reliability. Automation and security both need to be reliable. USB memory sticks, SSD’s and hard disks are a much better option than an SD Card.
The ability to install Addons with one click is attractive, which is why, after a lot of frustration with HassOS, all caused by filesystem (SDcard) problems, I will switch to Raspbian with Hass.io installed on top, on a USB connected SSD.
Would love to see this as well. Just gave up setting hass.io up based on Raspbian. It was above my head.
You only need to run about 6 lines of code, it’s really not hard to follow. Copy-paste this.
Install Raspbian as normal, log into terminal/putty and… sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y and then reboot once this has finished.
Next, log into terminal/putty;
sudo -i
apt-get install software-properties-common -y
add-apt-repository universe
apt-get update
apt-get install apparmor-utils apt-transport-https avahi-daemon ca-certificates curl dbus jq network-manager socat -y
curl -fsSL get.docker.com | sh
curl -sL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/home-assistant/hassio-installer/master/hassio_install.sh" | bash -s -- -m raspberrypi3
That’s it, Hass.io will take 20mins or so to start up and you are away. This guide is in the install section of the HA website also.
edit: the -- -m raspberrypi3 dictates to install to a RPi 3, if your Pi is Pi2, adjust accordingly.
Hi Jason,
thank you for taking the time to help me out here.
I tried that and if I remember correctly I had the following issues with this approach:
Docker CE is not available for Raspian Buster. See this post:
I think I then run into this issue described here:
And then I browsed this page to fix another issue:
I finally had hass.io up and running but finally failed installing the deCONZ add-on. It always said “This add-on is not available”. I think I was not able to make my Conbee II stick available to the docker container I guess.
Happy to give it another try. Perhaps I made some simple mistakes along the way.
I just need to know how to make the USB stick available and/or install the deCONZ add-on. Then I would be fine.
Use Rasbian Stretch until Buster has been updated. Just this week I did a fresh install using the above method on an RPi3 running Stretch. Running perfectly. Buster is not needed (unless you are using a Pi4)
Thanks Jason, I wanted to try this as well, but I could not find this image. Could you point me to the download page?
Edit: I think I found it:
http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/images/raspbian-2019-04-09/
Here you go. This torrent is direct from the Raspberry Pi website.
Thanks Jason, I made it work.
I documented the full process for anyone interested:
https://www.amalytix.com/en/home-assistant-with-conbee-ii-deconz-xiaomi-aqara-and-hass-io-from-scratch/#Installing_Hassio_on_a_SSD
The command add-apt-repository universe does not apply to Rasbian IMHO. I just left it out.
Thanks again for your tip to try Stretch and the adjusted command how to run the hass.io install script to make it work on a Raspberry.
Happy to help, glad you got it working.
hi, your tutorial looks very detailed, but what do you mean by the following?:
After flashing the SSD you need to login to your Raspberry Pi:
How to you flash and SSD (or a pen drive?)
Basically you download any image and use e.g. the balenaEtcher (for Mac) tool for put it on your hard drive. balenaEtcher normally works for USB sticks or SSD cards only but with some settings you can use it for SSDs too. Just be careful here to not accidentally wipe your main disk.
I think you are all going to have to bear in mind that any device has a number of write cycles (read cycles don’t seem to affect stuff much)
So most fails are (in order) : -
We are awaiting new solid state Hard disks based on varistors (I think that’s the term) the technology is available but they say being scaled down and tested (come on guys, that was 4 or 5 years ago). This ‘should’ extend cycles beyond hard disks (and maybe we can drop the ‘disk’ bit by then too) and no moving parts (like some of the current weaker options).
Whilst we wait : -
Reduce your write cycles
Most ‘drives’ (also refers to the motor spinning the disk) include wear evening, so it tries to ensure the ‘disk’ is worn out all at once (as it fails). This is why HA recommends a much larger card than you need, to spread the wear out.
So what do you use all those logs and history for ?
Turn off everything, then enable only for what you ‘need’ (not ‘want’, there’s a difference).
Buy a good quality ‘drive’ and treat it with respect, and it will be with you longer.
The devs hear your requests but they are constrained by meeting a reasonable price point for the ‘average’ user.
In the interim @kanga_who ('s excellent and continually updated guides) are able to help many people push the current envelope.
There are also guides on turning off history/logging and also for enabling specifics (it does help with debugging, but I’ve turned it all off)
My $0.02 anyway
thanks … will try it out and will let you know how it goes
can you provide more details on the following?
Make sure you added your SSH key before.
Please check the link in the same section. There this is explained:
thanks again … will try it out tomorrow.
I managed to boot from USB, put after the updates requested from the GUI, it was not booting 
do I have to update from the GUI?
I’ve been running Hass.io on Raspbian stretch lite for a few months now from a USB SSD (a 64GB ADATA industrial grade SSD).
I’d never want to go back to an SSD. It would never survive a power cut (electrician had turned the power off a couple of times) and the SD always corrupted.
Boot times are super fast and updates install much quicker too.
I also have more control with the option to run any other software on the pi whereas Hassos is much more locked down with no access to the underlying OS.
Thanks for the mention @Mutt. Link to the guides is HERE.
You can easily install Raspbian to an SSD, and boot from SSD once you enable the one time boot option. Run this command via terminal/Putty. (RPi3)
echo program_usb_boot_mode=1 | sudo tee -a /boot/config.txt
Reboot, then run this to check it worked.
vcgencmd otp_dump | grep 17:
Result should be;
17:3020000a