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?
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.