6 Hardware Recommendations for Home Assistant

hey guys and welcome back to another tech tutorial tuesday the series where you guys ask questions and i do my best to answer them as quickly and efficiently as possible and a question i get answered almost every single day is what hardware should i use to run home assistant or what hardware should i use to run home assistant and a nas or what hardware should i use to run home assistant and their surveillance system and so i thought it'd be good to finally sit down and make some hardware recommendations we can go through and some of the most common hardware platforms or hardware solutions out there for running home assistant kind of go through cover each one give you my pros and cons of each one when you should use each one and sort of cover the prices etc etc so that is what we're doing today if you like this video make sure to drop a like and get subscribed if you aren't already and if you want your question answered in the next tutorial tuesday make sure to drop it in the comments down below and you never know i might just answer it okay so the first hardware recommendation i'm gonna give you is to use the hardware that you already have and this is a great option for those people that are maybe not sure about getting into home system have never used home assistant before you're kind of just testing the waters and a lot of us already have the hardware to run home assistant um somewhere in our house already whether that be an old computer a gaming computer that you already use it's on pretty much all the time anyways an old laptop a synology nas or some other hardware platform a lot of us already have the hardware to run home assistant and that is a great thing about home assistant is that it's so widely available on pretty much any hardware you can imagine you can run it in some fashion on pretty much any hardware it's so low power and it will run pretty much everywhere so that is a great option if you want to just dip your toe in the water of home assistant and try it out see what it's like see if it's for you and get up and running fairly quickly without having to spend any money at all if you already have some hardware you can just quickly load home assistant on there get started figure out if you like it or not if it's something you want to delve into deeper um and so yeah i think using the hardware you already have is a great option if you just want to test the water and see if home assistant is for you probably the most popular platform for running home assistant on is of course the raspberry pi and the raspberry pi is a great way for beginners to get started with home assistant without spending a ton of money it's a very well documented platform and tons of people are running a raspberry pi and so you can't really go wrong on the support side of things if you're looking to pick up a raspberry pi i think it's a very good option if all you want to do is to run home assistant on a dedicated platform that's all it's going to do that's going to be its sole function then the raspberry pi is a great way to go like i mentioned it's a pretty low cost of entry for a great performing little device and in terms of which model you should choose if you already have a raspberry pi 3b or three already around your house and you can definitely use home assistant on that if you just want to try it out and get started but if you're going to pick up a new raspberry pi i would definitely recommend the raspberry pi 4 maybe the 2 gigabyte or the 4 gigabyte variant and you can pick up the 2 gigabyte variant plus an sd card for around 65 70 pounds here in the uk and of course i'll have links to everything in the description down below um and if you're going to pick up a raspberry pi 4 i would definitely recommend trying to do the ssd upgrade and if you can afford to do so this is going to get you not only speed improvement but also a reliability improvement from that sd card so yeah i would highly recommend doing the ssd upgrade if you can afford to do so you can pick up 128 gigabyte ssds um for around 20 pounds and i would just pick up the cheapest ssd you can get your hands on most of them the smallest capacity you can get nowadays is 128 gigabytes which of course is going to be more than plenty for running home assistant so yeah definitely do the ssd upgrade if you can afford to do so and pick up a raspberry pi 4. another very popular hardware choice and a competitor to the raspberry pi is the odroid n2 plus and this is also the exact same hardware as home assistant blue you may have heard of home assistant blue and this is basically um an old droid m2 plus with the home assistant image pre-loaded onto it and you also get the home assistant case or enclosure for that old droid n2 but the odroid m2 is going to get you a little bit more cpu performance than the raspberry pi and this is also a great option for beginners because it has a home assistant image already available for that exact device so you can just load on be up and running with home assistant in just a matter of minutes but this is an ideal hardware platform for those of you that have maybe outgrown your raspberry pi just a little bit you have um maybe a large or a larger sort of install a lot of integrations and maybe your raspberry pi is just struggling a little bit to keep up so this is a very good upgrade um for those of you who have outgrown a raspberry pi and you can pick up the odroid n2 plus for around 130 pounds here in the uk or you can pick up the home assistant blue which gets you that really nice and sleek looking case for 145 pounds here in the uk so a little bit more expensive than the raspberry pi but you are getting um a bit more performance for your money next up on my hardware recommendations is the intel nok this is definitely where we start getting into the higher tier performance devices but also the higher tier costs associated with that performance and the intel knock is a great device also for beginners as well because there are home assistant images available for the intel nook but the intel nok is great for when you want to run home assistant but you also want to run some other functions as well so not just home assistant but perhaps you want to run your own media server or plex server and maybe a small surveillance server or even you want to start doing some local object detection or local person detection on your cameras so the intel nook is great for obviously having a very small form factor um but a little bit more performance or a lot more performance actually than something like the old droid or definitely the raspberry pi and that's because they're using an x86 architecture as opposed to those other devices that use an arm processor instead so the intel nook is a great option for when you need much more performance for performing other tasks other than home assistant in a very small form factor that just sips power but you also don't mind paying for that privilege next up we have the used office pc and i actually think these are a great option for a lot of people out there you can pick these up for incredibly cheap on sites like ebay and you're getting a lot of performance for that money because again they are running that fully fledged x86 processor and also the nice thing about them is that they are very easily upgradable so you can upgrade things like the cpu and also the ram very easily as well as other things like the the um internal disk and you can use this for running again local object detection or something like a small media server or even a surveillance system as well as obviously running home assistant it's a bit more of an intermediate solution because there are no pre-built images available for these systems but it's not too difficult to get up and running obviously it's not quite as small form factor as something like the intel nok and they do use a little bit more power than the intel noc but the modern ones or the more modern ones at least the last couple of years and they run very low power on idle as it is so yeah i think that is a very good option you can pick up models like the hp elite desk as well as my personal favorite which is the dell optiplex line for it's so cheap on ebay i was able to find like i7s um for under 200 pounds which is incredible for the performance you're getting and the good thing about them also is that there is hundreds and hundreds of models to choose from there is an abundance of um used office pcs on ebay so yeah i think that is a very good option for a lot of people finally we come to the used enterprise server and this is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum to something like the raspberry pi or the intel nok that we looked at earlier and this is like the complete baller zero given to power consumption or noise or size just absolute balls to the wall screaming machine although it seems counter-intuitive because you're buying something that's used this is where you're going to get the maximum um reliability as well as speed performance and redundancy because these are enterprise servers they're meant to be on 24 7 365 and so the hardware inside them is built to last a very long time you also get things like redundant power supplies as well as hot swap hard drives hotspot fans dual network cards etc etc so you always have um or the hardware is designed to last for a very long time so this is a great option for those of you who want maximum performance maximum reliability maximum speed at the cost of obviously noise power consumption and size this is a great option for running all of the things so if you want to run home assistant as well as a fully fledged nas as well as a surveillance system as well as a media server as well as a local object detection as well as a vpn server and basically anything else you want this is a great option and you're getting a ton of value on the used market for the performance that you're getting and because it's enterprise gear it's going to last for a very long time and replacement parts for these systems are very cheap if you're looking to buy a used enterprise server i would look at models such as the dell poweredge t320 is a very good starter option and the prices of those have come down a lot in the last couple years and that gets you a very good system that you can also very easily upgrade in the past i was able to go pick up the pick up adele t320 and that had i think an eight core xeon inside just the base eight core xeon it was the lowest and option i intentionally bought um one with the lowest end processor in it and then i bought on the same auction or from the same uh website i bought um the highest end intel xeon that that server could support which is something like a 24 core um with hyper threading at the time um and it was like 30 pounds or something for that processor so yeah it was ridiculous at the time i bought that and so you can pick up very good deals and you can easily upgrade this hardware plus it's just fun to learn about or play with enterprise or servers um you learn so much by doing so and also you're getting a ton of performance for the money this is actually what i run my home assistant on obviously i don't just use it for a home assistant i have tons of other projects and tons of other servers that i run on my power edge server so that is what i use obviously it goes without saying that this is not a beginner option it does um it is a definitely a more advanced option but it's very fun to learn and i don't think you'll regret if you want to pick one up and that's some of my favorite hardware recommendations for running home system obviously there are a ton more options out there we didn't cover things like building your own desktop or building your own server but if you know about those things then chances are you probably aren't watching this video but that is a good thing about home assistant is that it's so lightweight and so efficient that it has the ability to run on almost every platform so chances are if you have a piece of hardware out there then you can probably run home assistant in some fashion but that is about all the time we have for this video hope you guys enjoyed it let me know in the comments down below what hardware you're running home assistant on i'm actually pretty interested to see the wide variety of hardware that everyone else is using so yeah let me know in the comments as well as your questions for the next tech tutorial tuesday and i will do my best to answer them if you want to support the channel you can do so by becoming a patron on patreon and your support allows me to keep on making these videos thank you to all my current patreon supporters your support is very much appreciated as always if you like this video make sure to drop it like and get subscribed and i will see you in the next one

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 204,648

Keywords: home assistant, home assistant hardware, home assistant hardware recommendations, home assistant server, home assistant raspberry pi, home assistant blue, home assistant odroid, home assistant desktop, home assistant hardware list, smart home, home automation, smart home hardware, home automation hardware, smart home recommendations, home automation recommendations, home assistant setup, home assistant automation

Id: rnh7vzOWABU

Length: 13min 5sec (785 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021