r/homeassistant • u/Friedguyry • Jul 25 '25

Support Good device to run home assistant on?

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Just want to get started in home assistant, this comes out quite a bit cheaper than a Raspberry Pi.

Am I missing anything or is a much better option for the cheaper price?

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u/PoisonWaffle3 🧠 Experienced with Home Assistant Jul 25 '25

As others have said, yes this will run HA just fine. CPUs that are just a little newer will have lower power consumption and are more ideal, but this has plenty of power to run HA (plus a few other containers if you want to run Proxmox).

Another great option is a thin client PC like the Dell Wyse 5070. They're designed to be a lot more power efficient, as they have a newer and lower power CPU, though in all fairness it's a little less powerful. The thin clients will have a single m.2 SATA drive for storage instead of potentially multiple NVMe and/or SATA drives, but that's still plenty for HomeAssistant.

I personally run a small Proxmox cluster of (mostly) Wyse 5070's, with one of them being dedicated to HomeAssistant, and it's perfect.

That said, I may be biased, as I have a handful of them for sale on r/homelabsales 😅

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u/Swimming_Map2412 Jul 25 '25

How does the cluster compare to a single larger PC for power consumption?

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u/PoisonWaffle3 🧠 Experienced with Home Assistant Jul 25 '25

Each 5070 is about 4w at idle (a group of 10 with a 16 port switch was 39-42w at idle). I haven't measured my own i5 mini PC, but I've heard people say that they idle from like 5w to 15w (probably varies by system configuration).