Faster/better than a 128 micro sd?
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I would be very wary in that drive.
However it’s shipped by amazon so returning it should not be a hassle.
Food for thought about cheap SSD’s. : FAKE 1TB SSD SCAM... They now appear as REAL drives...! - YouTube
Do you have one to recommend sub $50?
Thank you
If you’re just getting started, you may want to simply use a high quality, high endurance microSD card like the following
With 256GB worth of high quality flash cells + the wear leveling logic, this card will last a very long time.
If you really want to use a USB SSD, buy a 256G Samsung SATA drive plus one of the recommended USB-2-SATA adapters, like the following.
This will also require a Raspberry Pi 4 with a VERY good quality power supply.
There are some threads here in the community where all of this is discussed in detail.
Thank you. Currently running Amazon.com . You think this is good for a month or so?
Would a ssd be significantly faster than the sd you reccomended?
I like this combo of a m.2 ssd enclosure + 250gb m.2 ssd.
Because i find m.2 ssd’s more useful then portable usb only drives.
Only slightly over 50$
When u do this diy route, do I do anything extra? Or is it plug n play. Plug it into my Mac and just flash hassio
Yes, it should last for a good long while, it really is dependent on how many writes are occurring every day. For example, hosting a large number of devices and keeping history in InfluxDB, is going to wear out the storage faster.
MicroSD drives don’t wear out in a matter of weeks. It usually take many, many months before trouble starts. I have recorded continuously to SD cards like yours in cameras, as those cards have lasted well over a year. The Samsung High Endurance cards have never failed in multiple years of use.
Once the M.2 ssd enclosure are assembled it act’s as a USB storage device that any computer can utilize.
Or the short version, Yup . Plug and play.
Here is the thread to read on this particular subject. Lots of great information, including the updates and configuration required on the RPi 4 to allow it to boot from USB (if your Pi is an older one)
This stuff “ 5. For the brand new SSD drive, it may not find the drive, because the brand new SSD drive should be formatted before first time using. And also need to make the SSD drive partition.”
Oh dang, too much for me. Is a ssd noticeable over the sd you recommended?
If you’re just getting started, you’re probably not going to notice all that much difference in performance. The SSD will be quicker, but not earth shattering quicker.
If you want real high performance, use a small Intel based PC (e.g. a NUC) and use the HAOS for x86 image.
Or, if you want to stay in the RPi world, take a look at the Home Assistant Yellow, which supports booting directly off of an NVME drive, and includes the SkyConnect Zigbee radio onboard. Of course, finding a CM4 can be challenging these days, but is getting a little easier.
I looked at the nuc but got too confused. I didn’t understand how to run it headless. Do they run Debian or something?
A NUC (or similar x86 PC) running HAOS would behave almost identically to a RPi running HAOS. Home Assistant Operating System includes a headless Linux kernel, that hosts the Home Assistant containers.
Oh thank you. I read something like I have to spin up a vm and stopped reading. I would need a monitor,kb and mouse though to initial “download” h.a to the device?
You would use a PC or MAC to download the proper HAOS image (follow the documentation) and then “image” the drive, just like you must have done for the RPi microSD card you already have up and running (you do have it running, right?). Then simply install/attach the freshly images drive to the computer that you intend to boot off of it, attach an Ethernet cable, and power it up. Again, this is covered in the HA Getting Started Documentation.
In general, getting Home Assistant up and running is a lot more challenging than using a commercial, off the shelf hub like Hubitat. There is no “company” that you can rely on for any type of support. You have to basically rely on your own skills. Knowing some Linux skills, and understanding the architecture of Home Assistant is pretty important to building and maintaining a successful HA system. Hopefully, you’re up for the challenge. I just don’t want you to get frustrated in the process.
Keep in mind here is that even thought it’s NVMe, it’s going to be restricted to the speed of the rPi’s USB port.
Because of that, for my rPis I tend to use USB sticks. They’re fast enough and tend to be cheaper, and you can get tiny ones like https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-MUF-128AB-AM-Plus-128GB/dp/B07D7PDLXC/ for < $20
Both will probably fail sooner than later 
Including that “endurance” (marketing suceeded) card which is designed for the opposite task (writing continuous big chunks) and not small db writes HA is doing permanently. 
Reliability
- Endurance Up to 70,080 hours (or 8 years) of Full HD recording * Based on Full HD (1920x1080) video content recorded at 26 Mbps Video support.
- Warranty Limited 5 year warranty * Warranty for SD adapter is limited to 1 year.
It might be even that this card dies earlier in case they use (very) big page sizes and therefor waste the valuable flash cells even faster thank’s to write amplification. 
Some sd card manufactures that give extra (limited) warranty usually exclude use cases not described and that typically always includes scenarios with a high random IO with little sequential writes (for example running HaOS) 
If you gonna stick with micro sd cards the label you are gonna aiming for on your sd card is “A2” which is also what the docs tell you: 
- Micro SD Card. Ideally get one that is Application Class 2 as they handle small I/O much more consistently than cards not optimized to host applications. A 32 GB or bigger card is recommended.
In any other case you want to avoid cheap flash/ssd and go with the of the 5(?) manufactures left world wide like samsung or wd/sandisk as an example. 
The real difference of a good/quality SSD is the extra cache (often SLC flash) which allows to minimize the write amplification so that no valuable writes on QLC,TLC or MLC flash is wasted 
Completely different use case and you misinterpreted your mileage to be valid for a complete different task (which is it not!) 
If you use such cards for continuous recording like the seller expects (“Full HD (1920x1080) video content recorded at 26 Mbps”) the write amplification factor will be probably always be 1. 
So for every (m)byte requested from the OS to be written to storage also exactly one (m)byte is actually written to flash. That’s great because no waste of valuable flash cells. 
But wait, now we don’t write 26Mbps contentiously (and the limited warranty might is void) but instead we let HA do it’s job which consists of writing a very small amount of data but that quite regularly. 
As an example if HA(OS) wants to write only 1 byte it will cause huge write amplification because it’s not possible for the flash storage to only write that 1 byte. Instead a whole page worth of (e.g) 16kbyte gets written/wasted/worn for that tiny little byte.
Now we can do the easy calculation and we find out that the write amplification factor would be 16.000 (yes, sixteen thousand) in this case.
So while @ogiewon got good mileage using this cards for the proper task with a WAF=1 they are NOT RECOMMENDED for the use with HA or any other DB application and should be avoided
The correct sd cards one wants to use are listed in the docs and what only matters is that they have the A2 class (beside probably using a product from a flash manufacture too).