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?
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.