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Comment by longtermemory | Hacker News Reader

Nice! For the hardware, why didn't you considered using a Raspberry Pi?

Cost-wise, there's a solid chance that the Pi would have been more expensive. Jeff Geerling ran some numbers (^1) on this last year, before the current chip crisis we're in, and it was bad enough already.

Home Assistant does a surprising amount of Disk I/O, if for nothing than for logs. Sibling commenters are also advising not running it on the SD card to avoid wearing it out, so there's definitely some truth here. This means we're adding a Pi M.2 hat + SSD into the mix. The Pi5 SSD kit for 256 GB, when it was available, was around $60 USD. A Pi5 with 8 GB of RAM is $130 USD. Now we need a cooler, a case that will fit the Pi5 with said M.2 hat, and a power supply. We're already well north of $250 USD, encroaching on $300, and we're not even using the core benefits of the Pi's platform. No need for GPIO pins, tightly integrated cameras or other sensors, none of that.

For all we know, the blog author did this assessment (or trusted the assessment of others, eg: Jeff) and came to the came conclusion - it wasn't worth the price of entry.

^1: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/intel-n100-better-val...

I used to run HA on an RPi, but eventually migrated it to a similar NUC. The RPi eventually just wasn't powerful enough (peak compute needs), while the NUCs are still quite cheap. And you can run a surprising amount of Proxmox VMs and LXCs on barely a few cores and gigabytes of RAM.

I use an RPi 4 w/ 4GB of RAM and a 1TB usb 3.2 SSD and it flies through all my workloads. Though I don’t do any video encoding things.

The cool thing is that it's very easy to migrate it to better hardware. HA backup and restore system is highly reliable. For this reason I can definitely recommend an RPi to start with, and who knows perhaps it will be enough forever, but if not then moving is a matter of ~one evening.

Thanks for sharing, your comment helped me track down that my RPI HA was disk constrained. I didn't think to add a USB.

Wow, not sure how to interpret your experience that a RPi wasn't powerful enough to manage watering a few plants. I can only suspect the overall software setup is massively bloated.

If you want to run EspHome inside HA, and you recompile the devices (every release of EH), you want a decent processor/disk. The ESP stuff is a surprisingly heavy compile for a puny microcontroller.

A recent RPi is sufficient to handle a few plants - though, yes, recompilation will take time. The ESP is a beautiful piece of software, hence I highly recommend it. My native language has an expression that describes this situation perfectly: the appetite grows with eating. Next thing you know you have 2k or more entities, and your HA even handles some video feeds.

The important thing is that it's pretty much always easy to make an upgrade thanks to the good design of the backup system. Don't forget to set up backups in either case, it's a sin to not use such a complete system :)

Home Assistant is indeed a massive pile of software, mostly Python. I couldn’t get it to work reliably (or, at least, usably - the web interface was painful to use) on a Pi Zero because of memory requirements and disk access speed.

…having said that, as the other poster alludes to, it’s peak requirements that are problematic. If your device can handle them, it’s not a massive power suck because idle requirmements are low.

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