I installed Home Assistant on the brand new
Raspberry Pi 5 as well as on the older Raspberry Pi 4 just to see if there is any difference
in terms of the performance. I just wanted to see if Raspberry Pi 5 is much faster and
better device for running Home Assistant than its predecessor. At the moment of shooting
this video there is only one official Home Assistant installation method that I can use
on both devices. Namely, Home Assistant Core method which is basically Home Assistant
running inside Python virtual environment. These are the things that I used. From the
hardware part: I used Raspberry Pi 5 8G version with the official case with active cooling. And
the Raspberry Pi 4 8G version with some case without any cooling. Both devices are powered by
the official Raspberry Pi adapters. 27W for the Raspberry Pi 5 and 15W for the Raspberry Pi 4.
Next thing that I used is this SD card which is not the fastest on the market but it is also far
from the slowest. It is more like in the upper segment in terms of reading and writing speed.
I will use the same SD card for both devices, so the storage speed comparison to be fair.
If you want to check the current prices of these parts you can find some affiliate links in
the video description. From the software part, first thing that I used is the Raspberry
Pi Imager. With the Raspberry Pi Imager I installed the Raspberry Pi OS lite 64-bit on
the SD card. And here Lite version means there will be no Graphical interface of the Raspberry
Pi Operating System which is just perfect as I don’t want other programs and processes apart
from Home Assistant to take the CPU and Memory of the devices. I enabled the SSH, that way
I will be able to connect to the raspberries over the network using only my laptop and I
don’t have to use any additional Monitors, keyboards or mouses. Once I finished with the card
I inserted it in the Raspberry Pi 5 SD card slot, I connected it to my home network with a
LAN cable and I started it. I looked in my router for the assigned IP and then I used the
following command to connect to my Raspberry Pi 5. Once connected I installed Home Assistant
using the instructions on official web page. I simply copied the commands and I pasted
them in my terminal just like a robot, zero brain usage involving task. If
you want to do the same you can get the full commands and the link to that
official page from the video description Just to mention, everything is official here
just like my Home Assistant Webinar which is officially free and you can register on my
website https://automatelike.pro/webinar Inside the webinar I will talk about the
pros and cons of all of the official Home Assistant installation types + 1 secret way
to get started on a PC in under 5 minutes. After I finished with the Home Assistant
installation I tried to open in my browser the IP of my Raspberry Pi followed by colon 8123
as the port. I waited few minutes more for the installation to complete and then I had to go
through the Home Assistant onboarding process which is super easy and intuitive and I won’t
go into details as nothing can go wrong here. I also went to the settings and I saw the current
load of the system which is super negligible. But have in mind that this is a brand new
installation and nothing is loading the system. Then I opened the Raspberry Pi console again and I executed the following commands
to stress test my Raspberry Pi 5. I used little command-line tool
called stressberry which measures the core temperature and I let it run for
around 10 minutes. During that time the CPU was at 100% usage and up to 2400MHz
frequency and the temperature didn’t go above 75 degrees also Home Assistant was
quite usable during this extreme tests. Then I used another tool called hdparm to test the SD card speed and Raspberry
Pi 5 storage throughput. The first result tells us how fast the Raspberry
Pi 5 works, including the processor, memory, and storage. The second result shows how
quickly the device is reading data from the SD card in a row. I run this command
twice to see the effect of the caching. I also restarted the Raspberry Pi 5 and I
measured the starting time with my watch, it is not super scientific, but it works. I wrote everything down and I moved the same SD card to the Raspberry Pi 4 and
I did the same things and tests. I started the Home Assistant on the Raspberry
Pi 4, I started the stressberry tool to stress test the device the temperature didn’t
go above 65 degrees Celsius but the CPU frequency stayed at 600Mhz for unknown
to me reasons. Then I executed the hdparm command twice to check the SD card speed
and I restarted the Raspberry Pi 4 and I measured the starting time. Here are the
comparisons. Where Raspberry Pi 5 is on the right. It turns out that the raspberry Pi
5 is almost twice faster in terms of SD card reading and system rebooting and Home Assistant
starting. Also the CPU frequency used on the Raspberry Pi 5 was much higher as well as the
CPU temperature despite the active cooling. These simple tests are showing that Raspberry
Pi 5 is the faster device, no doubts about that, but not multiple times faster in terms of
running Home Assistant. I’m dying for the Home Assistant OS release for Raspberry Pi 5 so
I can test the speed of local speech recognition. But that may be another video. Until then, I
can baldly say that both Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 are fully capable of running Home Assistant
smoothly. If you find a Raspberry Pi 5 for just $5 more than the price of the Pi 4. Get one
fast On the other hand, if you find a Raspberry Pi 4 for cheap as there are such offers now
even used one is OK don’t hesitate to get one as well. It will serve you perfectly for many
more years running Home Assistant flawlessly. If some of the terms that I’m
using are not so clear for you, then download my Smart Home
Glossary for free from my website You can also watch this video of mine
where I’m showing 5 Raspberry Pi tips I’m Kiril see you next week. Bye!
