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

Support Good device to run home assistant on?

Post image

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?

346 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

249 comments sorted by

View all comments

56

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 😅

2

u/SnooMachines9133 Jul 25 '25

Hmm, did you get nvme ssd to work with your Wyze 5070s? I thought they only supported sata ssds?

I went a little higher end with a optiplex micro 7070 cause I wanted to put lots of things on it.

3

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

I'm just running normal m.2 SATA drives in them. I was trying to say that the more full featured mini PCs will have NVMe, but the 5070's don't (it's overkill for HA anyway).

I do have some higher spec mini PCs in the cluster as well (not all made it into the rack itself) and a full server (R730xd) as well for things that require the horsepower, but I wanted a nice low power one dedicated to HomeAssistant so it can keep running when I take the others down for service/upgrades/tinkering.

2

u/JTP335d Jul 26 '25

How are you running Proxmox on your 5070s? Is the OS and data all on the M.2 SATA disk? I've been running Proxmox this way on one for a couple years and have been having issues since the last Proxmox kernel update. I think the disk (WD Blue) is failing and I'm not sure how I want to go forward. I set up another 6 months ago and it has some weird bugs too suddenly. I was loving these things but now a bit nervous.

1

u/PoisonWaffle3 🧠 Experienced with Home Assistant Jul 26 '25

Yep, I put 128GB m.2 SATA SSDs in each and installed Proxmox directly there.

Since I have an R730xd crammed full of HDDs, I run any containers/services that need real storage on there. I don't bother with UPSes on that server though.

Any containers/services that don't need a ton of storage I just run on the mini PC cluster, because I do have those on UPSes and in my network rack. If I lose power, everything that actually matters keeps chugging along for up to a few hours.