4 ms·

Nice! For the hardware, why didn't you considered using a Raspberry Pi?

H8crilA 7mo ago
I used to run HA on an RPi, but eventually migrated it to a similar NUC. The RPi eventually just wasn't powerful enough (peak compute needs), while the NUCs are still quite cheap. And you can run a surprising amount of Proxmox VMs and LXCs on barely a few cores and gigabytes of RAM.
- davemp 7mo ago
  I use an RPi 4 w/ 4GB of RAM and a 1TB usb 3.2 SSD and it flies through all my workloads. Though I don’t do any video encoding things.
  - H8crilA 7mo ago
    The cool thing is that it's very easy to migrate it to better hardware. HA backup and restore system is highly reliable. For this reason I can definitely recommend an RPi to start with, and who knows perhaps it will be enough forever, but if not then moving is a matter of ~one evening.
    - xolox 7mo ago
      Funny that I should run into this now... Just this past weekend I tried the Home Assistant backup/restore mechanism for the first time, and it failed miserably for me :-(. First it took over an hour to create the backup, then I got a 4.42 GiB tar file, that of course failed to upload to the new Home Assistant install. I investigated and found that the tarball was just a compressed copy of the complete installation directory of my Home Assistant setup, and that included multi gigabyte `.cache/pip` and `.cache/uv` directories :-s (my old Home Assistant install operates from a Python virtual environment that I created, and Home Assistant keeps nagging me that this installation method is deprecated, so I decided to migrate to HAOS in a VM). When I deleted those directories the tarball was less than 200 MiB but the new HAOS VM still would not accept the upload. All I got was "500 Internal Server Error - Server got itself in trouble". And of course because HAOS is an "appliance" its kind of a black box so I couldn't find out how to get access to error logs with details :-(. In the end I decided that the path of least resistance was to simply start from scratch based on the HAOS virtual machine and take some days/weeks to build up the new Home Assistant setup before it's mature enough to take over from the old Home Assistant setup (which is running on hardware that is close to failure).
  - randusername 7mo ago
    Thanks for sharing, your comment helped me track down that my RPI HA was disk constrained. I didn't think to add a USB.
- mytailorisrich 7mo ago
  Wow, not sure how to interpret your experience that a RPi wasn't powerful enough to manage watering a few plants. I can only suspect the overall software setup is massively bloated.
  - briHass 7mo ago
    If you want to run EspHome inside HA, and you recompile the devices (every release of EH), you want a decent processor/disk. The ESP stuff is a surprisingly heavy compile for a puny microcontroller.
    - H8crilA 7mo ago
      A recent RPi is sufficient to handle a few plants - though, yes, recompilation will take time. The ESP is a beautiful piece of software, hence I highly recommend it. My native language has an expression that describes this situation perfectly: the appetite grows with eating. Next thing you know you have 2k or more entities, and your HA even handles some video feeds. The important thing is that it's pretty much always easy to make an upgrade thanks to the good design of the backup system. Don't forget to set up backups in either case, it's a sin to not use such a complete system :)
    - mytailorisrich 7mo ago
      Recompilation has nothing, or should have nothing, to do with the requirements to run the system. If that is indeed a requirement then the system is indeed bonkers. For a system handling sensors and actuators you should be able to run a farm off a RPi in terms of compute power. Quad-core at 2.4 GHz and up to 16 GiB RAM on a RPi 5, that's a crazy amount of compute for the use-case.
      - vablings 7mo ago
        The way ESPHome works is that your device configuration is a yaml file that produces a compiled binary artifact and it can be updated OTA with wifi. The downside of this is that these updates are pushed via the device you are running HAOS and hence compiling can take a while. HAOS is quite bloated but it's also very versatile and FOSS
belthesar 7mo ago
Cost-wise, there's a solid chance that the Pi would have been more expensive. Jeff Geerling ran some numbers (^1) on this last year, before the current chip crisis we're in, and it was bad enough already. Home Assistant does a surprising amount of Disk I/O, if for nothing than for logs. Sibling commenters are also advising not running it on the SD card to avoid wearing it out, so there's definitely some truth here. This means we're adding a Pi M.2 hat + SSD into the mix. The Pi5 SSD kit for 256 GB, when it was available, was around $60 USD. A Pi5 with 8 GB of RAM is $130 USD. Now we need a cooler, a case that will fit the Pi5 with said M.2 hat, and a power supply. We're already well north of $250 USD, encroaching on $300, and we're not even using the core benefits of the Pi's platform. No need for GPIO pins, tightly integrated cameras or other sensors, none of that. For all we know, the blog author did this assessment (or trusted the assessment of others, eg: Jeff) and came to the came conclusion - it wasn't worth the price of entry. ^1: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/intel-n100-better-value-raspberry-pi/ https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/intel-n100-better-val...

I used to run HA on an RPi, but eventually migrated it to a similar NUC. The RPi eventually just wasn't powerful enough (peak compute needs), while the NUCs are still quite cheap. And you can run a surprising amount of Proxmox VMs and LXCs on barely a few cores and gigabytes of RAM.

davemp 7mo ago
I use an RPi 4 w/ 4GB of RAM and a 1TB usb 3.2 SSD and it flies through all my workloads. Though I don’t do any video encoding things.
- H8crilA 7mo ago
  The cool thing is that it's very easy to migrate it to better hardware. HA backup and restore system is highly reliable. For this reason I can definitely recommend an RPi to start with, and who knows perhaps it will be enough forever, but if not then moving is a matter of ~one evening.
  - xolox 7mo ago
    Funny that I should run into this now... Just this past weekend I tried the Home Assistant backup/restore mechanism for the first time, and it failed miserably for me :-(. First it took over an hour to create the backup, then I got a 4.42 GiB tar file, that of course failed to upload to the new Home Assistant install. I investigated and found that the tarball was just a compressed copy of the complete installation directory of my Home Assistant setup, and that included multi gigabyte `.cache/pip` and `.cache/uv` directories :-s (my old Home Assistant install operates from a Python virtual environment that I created, and Home Assistant keeps nagging me that this installation method is deprecated, so I decided to migrate to HAOS in a VM). When I deleted those directories the tarball was less than 200 MiB but the new HAOS VM still would not accept the upload. All I got was "500 Internal Server Error - Server got itself in trouble". And of course because HAOS is an "appliance" its kind of a black box so I couldn't find out how to get access to error logs with details :-(. In the end I decided that the path of least resistance was to simply start from scratch based on the HAOS virtual machine and take some days/weeks to build up the new Home Assistant setup before it's mature enough to take over from the old Home Assistant setup (which is running on hardware that is close to failure).
- randusername 7mo ago
  Thanks for sharing, your comment helped me track down that my RPI HA was disk constrained. I didn't think to add a USB.
mytailorisrich 7mo ago
Wow, not sure how to interpret your experience that a RPi wasn't powerful enough to manage watering a few plants. I can only suspect the overall software setup is massively bloated.
- briHass 7mo ago
  If you want to run EspHome inside HA, and you recompile the devices (every release of EH), you want a decent processor/disk. The ESP stuff is a surprisingly heavy compile for a puny microcontroller.
  - H8crilA 7mo ago
    A recent RPi is sufficient to handle a few plants - though, yes, recompilation will take time. The ESP is a beautiful piece of software, hence I highly recommend it. My native language has an expression that describes this situation perfectly: the appetite grows with eating. Next thing you know you have 2k or more entities, and your HA even handles some video feeds. The important thing is that it's pretty much always easy to make an upgrade thanks to the good design of the backup system. Don't forget to set up backups in either case, it's a sin to not use such a complete system :)
  - mytailorisrich 7mo ago
    Recompilation has nothing, or should have nothing, to do with the requirements to run the system. If that is indeed a requirement then the system is indeed bonkers. For a system handling sensors and actuators you should be able to run a farm off a RPi in terms of compute power. Quad-core at 2.4 GHz and up to 16 GiB RAM on a RPi 5, that's a crazy amount of compute for the use-case.
    - vablings 7mo ago
      The way ESPHome works is that your device configuration is a yaml file that produces a compiled binary artifact and it can be updated OTA with wifi. The downside of this is that these updates are pushed via the device you are running HAOS and hence compiling can take a while. HAOS is quite bloated but it's also very versatile and FOSS

belthesar 7mo ago

Cost-wise, there's a solid chance that the Pi would have been more expensive. Jeff Geerling ran some numbers (^1) on this last year, before the current chip crisis we're in, and it was bad enough already. Home Assistant does a surprising amount of Disk I/O, if for nothing than for logs. Sibling commenters are also advising not running it on the SD card to avoid wearing it out, so there's definitely some truth here. This means we're adding a Pi M.2 hat + SSD into the mix. The Pi5 SSD kit for 256 GB, when it was available, was around $60 USD. A Pi5 with 8 GB of RAM is $130 USD. Now we need a cooler, a case that will fit the Pi5 with said M.2 hat, and a power supply. We're already well north of $250 USD, encroaching on $300, and we're not even using the core benefits of the Pi's platform. No need for GPIO pins, tightly integrated cameras or other sensors, none of that. For all we know, the blog author did this assessment (or trusted the assessment of others, eg: Jeff) and came to the came conclusion - it wasn't worth the price of entry. ^1: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/intel-n100-better-value-raspberry-pi/ https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/intel-n100-better-val...