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?
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.