I’ve been using the same Raspberry Pi 4 to host HA for years. It’s worked well enough, but I worry about the stability of the SD card. I’m no stranger to cards that fail suddenly. Had one fail on another Pi just yesterday.
The various HA hardware offerings (Green/Yellow) use more stable flash storage. Can I swap out one hub for another? If so, how difficult is it? What would I be gaining or giving up by going with HA’s offering? I know the Yellow has a built-in zigbee radio and PoE, but you need to buy a Pi compute module. There are also fewer USB ports on both the yellow and the green compared to the pi.
I know I could use any computer to host HA, and thus gain arbitrarily performant storage/memory/other stuff. Is there any advantage to, say, having more storage? What exactly is HA storing besides the history of entity states?
Alternative option: Get a Zimablase, get a cheap SATA SSD, chuck Proxmox on it, let HA run on that (and possibly a few more things), use an expansion card if you need more direct USB ports or storage. And have a far easier option to backup the whole thing.
I’m already running a proxmox server on an old laptop. Maybe I could look into that. I need to figure out USB passthrough for the zwave and zigbee dongles.
That is usually only a click on the webgui - as long as your dongles have proper Linux divers (which they likely will have). I helped various friends with their setup and always had no issues with that.
If you already are playing around with proxmox and might have more containers the zimaboard instead of the blade (or a minisforum, a used mini pc or similar) might be more fitting,though.
Have you considered an N100/N150 based mini PC? Not much higher power draw, much better performance, expandability - RAM (up to 32GB), NVMe SSDs, m.2 slots for other devices. You can easily set up a VM/container environment to run more than HA if you need/want to.
I’ll second this. I have mine on an old NUC and it has been great.
It seems you need more USB ports than the Green / Yellow support… and USB hubs aren’t great… so, unless you’re purchasing the hardware to support the foundation, then other options are better.
As many others have said, getting a SSD for the Pi is probably best - if your hardware has enough RAM. No hardware is wasted, small cost, etc. IIRC, you’ll need to take a full backup (all options enabled), do a full clean re-install and then restore your backup. Then select the option to move your data.
The benefit of going to another device (ie passively cooled N1xx) is that tje storage and memory allow you to expand what you’re doing with HA - more addons, better graphs (ie Grafana), longer term history, etc. If you’re not interested in all that, stick with the Pi.
I would recommend just getting an inexpensive USB 3.0 m.2 or sata adapter ($10) and using a spare drive you have laying around with it. Should be dramatically more reliable.
(Just be careful if you decided to use a large spinning disk, they can have higher power draw than the Pi can support, m.2 or sata SSD is the way to go here if you want simplicity)
I use a Pi4 as well. You do know that it is possible to make it boot from an SSD or HDD, right?
https://thelinuxcode.com/how_to_boot_raspberry_pi_4_from_usb_ssd/
I just use a mini pc I bought from AliExpress. It’s a GMKtec with an n100 it has SSD storage and plenty of ram. I use a Sonnoff ZBDongle-E for the Zigbee radio also from AliExpress. You can even flash the dongle to run OpenThread so you can use it for Matter. Though you need to buy two dongles to run both Zigbee and Thread. It cost almost the same as an HA Green.
I’ve been using a “high endurance” card. These are the only ones SanDisk will do their guarantee for if you use them in a Pi.
I’m using SanDisk Extreme Pro cards in my various Pis for years now. The worst that happened once or maybe twice in the past 10 years is a card going read-only. Which is easily fixed by cloning it to a new one and running fsck.
2nd the SSD suggestion. I switched to one after a couple of microSD failures and it is very stable and way faster. A 240GB SSD is around $30. Even if you eventually decide to go to a different HA platform the SSD will make the Pi much more useful for other things.
The only thing keep in mind is the power limitation of your Pi. Make sure whatever you buy doesn’t draw more than the Pi power supply can provide.
What you could do is get a usb SSD and move the data to that, I did that and worked fine.
The only real problem with the Pi 4 is if you got a low RAM model. Otherwise keep trucking. Use only the best SD cards or SSD as others have suggested.
It’s been a few years, but back when I was using crappier hardware I restored from a backup a few times. From a quick glance of the docs, it sounds like it’s the same as what I remember. So yeah, just make sure you’ve got a good, recent backup, then give it a whirl. If anything goes wrong you could always wipe the new machine and start again, and/or roll back to your current hardware.
I don’t know a lot about HA green/yellow, but from a very quick glance, I would be surprised if you couldn’t find a little miniPC for less. Especially with lots of people getting rid of computers because of the whole Windows 11 thing. That way you wouldn’t be paying for any built in radios and you could spring for their new z-wave radio.
Other benefits of going to an actual PC would be running something like proxmox, then running HA in a VM. That’s what I’m doing and I love it, especially with scripts from this site. I especially like separating things like z-wave and zigbee from HA, that way a HA reboot takes less time and the z-wave network doesn’t go down.
Whatever way you decide to go, there’s a lot of different ways to peel this potato. You could even just get a new SD card and keep it as a spare, then setup backups to automatically be uploaded somewhere else and restore to that spare SD card if you have a failure, that could be the path of least resistance.
I used a pi for HA for years with no issue. Just use a good quality legitimate sd card and make regular backups of your setup
I use a cheap NUC now but that is about processing overhead mainly due to rtsp streams. If you have a setup like mine (10+ cameras, 4k streams) you’ll find it starts to get unusable and chokes after a certain number of streams (iirc like 5-6). This is exacerbated if you bridge the streams to homekit or stuff like that (though not as much if you do something like scrypted external to the pi obviously but then it’s like what do you run that on?)
