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?

  • besmtt@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    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.