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.