Home Assistant + Raspberry Pi + Failing SD Cards + Databases

[abudabi]

Unfortunately, at this time, you can't boot a Raspberry Pi 4 off an external drive. But you can force the Raspbian OS to use an external drive for its "root" partition, which holds all of its programs and data. So, in effect, you have a small boot partition on a microSD card but the meat of the entire operating system would still live on your speedy SSD or Flash Drive. A future firmware update will allow the Pi 4 to boot off of external drives, no microSD card required.

Is this only relevent to pi4 or do the previous gen PI's also suffer from this?

 

[SauRoNZA]

Unfortunately, at this time, you can't boot a Raspberry Pi 4 off an external drive. But you can force the Raspbian OS to use an external drive for its "root" partition, which holds all of its programs and data. So, in effect, you have a small boot partition on a microSD card but the meat of the entire operating system would still live on your speedy SSD or Flash Drive. A future firmware update will allow the Pi 4 to boot off of external drives, no microSD card required.

Yeah I’ve discovered this very non-sensical oddity.

Fortunately it seems as long as you can keep your Home Assistant lightweight and reduce the logging it should be reasonably alright with an SD card over time.

Maybe I should look for an older Pi second hand on the cheap cheap.

 

[Thor]

Is this only relevent to pi4 or do the previous gen PI's also suffer from this?

As far as my testing goes it seems USB boot is only compatible with the Raspberry Pi 3B and 3B+ (may also work on the Pi 2B v1.2, but not v1.1).

 

[abudabi]

As far as my testing goes it seems USB boot is only compatible with the Raspberry Pi 3B and 3B+ (may also work on the Pi 2B v1.2, but not v1.1).

Yeah googled it as well. Seems daft to have left it out.


USB mass storage boot
USB mass storage boot is available on Raspberry Pi 2B v1.2, 3A+, 3B, and 3B+ only. Support for USB mass storage boot will be added to the Raspberry Pi 4B in a future software update.

Raspberry Pi Documentation - Raspberry Pi Hardware

The official documentation for Raspberry Pi computers and microcontrollers

www.raspberrypi.org

 

[Thor]

I would be very curious as to what the reason is.

But @SauRoNZA I want to get my hands on a ODROID-N2

ODROID-N2 with 4GByte RAM – ODROID

www.hardkernel.com

 

[abudabi]

So for a Pi3B that's going to be dedicated to HA... what's the recommended setup to get decent performance? Lightweight linux with hassio on a USB stick?

I'm used to ubuntu but happy to try Arch/Raspbian (or whatever is the lightest)

 

[ebendl]

Yeah googled it as well. Seems daft to have left it out.


USB mass storage boot
USB mass storage boot is available on Raspberry Pi 2B v1.2, 3A+, 3B, and 3B+ only. Support for USB mass storage boot will be added to the Raspberry Pi 4B in a future software update.

Raspberry Pi Documentation - Raspberry Pi Hardware

The official documentation for Raspberry Pi computers and microcontrollers

www.raspberrypi.org

Read a bit further, doesn't seem as if HassOS supports booting from USB.

Best suggestion is to install Raspbian and boot that from USB, then run Hassio using the Docker route.

 

[patrick123]

So for a Pi3B that's going to be dedicated to HA... what's the recommended setup to get decent performance? Lightweight linux with hassio on a USB stick?

I'm used to ubuntu but happy to try Arch/Raspbian (or whatever is the lightest)

The HassOS that is with hass.io is already a trimmed bare necessity OS. No need to use any other.

 

[TedLasso]

So I was gifted a very nice HP EliteDesk PC (i5, 4GB RAM, 512GB Drive). I will replace the mechanical disk with a SSD , upgrade RAM to 16GB (overkill?) and then use it to consolidate the work of a few PIs. I am thinking of this. Windows 10 as the OS, the prebuilt Hass.io as a VM (Oracle). Inside the Hass.io instance, I want to activate the Ubiquiti controller, PiHole DNS, Plex Server to replace all my various Pis). The reason I want Win10 as the host OS is that I understand it better than Linux and at least if I need to upgrade Hass.io VM, all I need to do is make a snapshot/clone it, do upgrade and if it all fails, just roll back.

Is this a good idea? If anyone using hass.io with all the modules like PiHole, Plex, Ubiquiti running? Do you find it reliable?

 

[ebendl]

So I was gifted a very nice HP EliteDesk PC (i5, 4GB RAM, 512GB Drive). I will replace the mechanical disk with a SSD , upgrade RAM to 16GB (overkill?) and then use it to consolidate the work of a few PIs. I am thinking of this. Windows 10 as the OS, the prebuilt Hass.io as a VM (Oracle). Inside the Hass.io instance, I want to activate the Ubiquiti controller, PiHole DNS, Plex Server to replace all my various Pis). The reason I want Win10 as the host OS is that I understand it better than Linux and at least if I need to upgrade Hass.io VM, all I need to do is make a snapshot/clone it, do upgrade and if it all fails, just roll back.

Is this a good idea? If anyone using hass.io with all the modules like PiHole, Plex, Ubiquiti running? Do you find it reliable?

If you're planning on running VMs then I would go 16GB yes.

I would however then consider running some of the add ons as native Windows apps. Plex works quite well under Windows on my old HP i7 notebook.

 

[ebendl]

Read a bit further, doesn't seem as if HassOS supports booting from USB.

Best suggestion is to install Raspbian and boot that from USB, then run Hassio using the Docker route.

HassOS 3 released! Raspberry Pi 4 support

HassOS update: Raspberry Pi 4 now officially supported!

www.home-assistant.io

USB boot is now supported on HassOS 3 which was announced today. Only Pi 3 unfortunately.

Think I might just try this with a USB SSD drive.

 

[TedLasso]

HassOS 3 released! Raspberry Pi 4 support

HassOS update: Raspberry Pi 4 now officially supported!

www.home-assistant.io

USB boot is now supported on HassOS 3 which was announced today. Only Pi 3 unfortunately.

Think I might just try this with a USB SSD drive.

Talk about timing. Pi with USB boot changes everything.

Referencing my previous post , thought that memory (DDR3 1600MHz SODIMM) would be cheap. It's ridiculously expensive even just for a 4GB module

Now rethinking everything. Maybe just connect my Pi3 to a SSD, boot from there and then run the Hass.io, as I have with the core modules on it, and then when USB boot is supported on Pi4, buy a Pi4.

Will probably just use that PC I got as a media server , Ubiquiti controller keeping the mechanical drive. Once it's up and running, it should be fast enough. At least the i5 should be good for transcoding.

 

[patrick123]

Talk about timing. Pi with USB boot changes everything.

Referencing my previous post , thought that memory (DDR3 1600MHz SODIMM) would be cheap. It's ridiculously expensive even just for a 4GB module

Now rethinking everything. Maybe just connect my Pi3 to a SSD, boot from there and then run the Hass.io, as I have with the core modules on it, and then when USB boot is supported on Pi4, buy a Pi4.

Will probably just use that PC I got as a media server , Ubiquiti controller keeping the mechanical drive. Once it's up and running, it should be fast enough. At least the i5 should be good for transcoding.

Would it not be simpler to store your info on the media server? The SD card will then last nearly forever.

recorder:
  purge_keep_days: 50
  db_url: sqlite:////192.168.x.x/homeassistant

 

[ebendl]

Would it not be simpler to store your info on the media server? The SD card will then last nearly forever.

recorder:
purge_keep_days: 50
db_url: sqlite:////192.168.x.x/homeassistant

This was one of my plans too but I am concerned about log files on the SD card too.

Seriously investigating the boot from an SSD option too with my Pi 3B+. Unfortunately it does seem as if the hardware support for USB to SATA adapters are really finicky (from the reading I did last night). Pity because it seems as if one of the easiest ways for normal Raspian users are to boot from the SD card, mount the SSD and then load the OS from it further. But no indication that HassOS supports that.

 

[SauRoNZA]

So for a Pi3B that's going to be dedicated to HA... what's the recommended setup to get decent performance? Lightweight linux with hassio on a USB stick?

I'm used to ubuntu but happy to try Arch/Raspbian (or whatever is the lightest)

No Linux at all, Hass.io is the OS.

 

[SauRoNZA]

So I was gifted a very nice HP EliteDesk PC (i5, 4GB RAM, 512GB Drive). I will replace the mechanical disk with a SSD , upgrade RAM to 16GB (overkill?) and then use it to consolidate the work of a few PIs. I am thinking of this. Windows 10 as the OS, the prebuilt Hass.io as a VM (Oracle). Inside the Hass.io instance, I want to activate the Ubiquiti controller, PiHole DNS, Plex Server to replace all my various Pis). The reason I want Win10 as the host OS is that I understand it better than Linux and at least if I need to upgrade Hass.io VM, all I need to do is make a snapshot/clone it, do upgrade and if it all fails, just roll back.

Is this a good idea? If anyone using hass.io with all the modules like PiHole, Plex, Ubiquiti running? Do you find it reliable?

Just go Hass.io directly.

It’s brain dead simple and if nothing else you’ll learn some new skills.

Windows would be a waste of useless resources.

 

[SauRoNZA]

Would it not be simpler to store your info on the media server? The SD card will then last nearly forever.

recorder:
purge_keep_days: 50
db_url: sqlite:////192.168.x.x/homeassistant

Problem is one needs to keep that online as well then.

I reckon simply trimming down the recorder is the way to go so you write small amount of state changes and that’s it.

A nicer solution would have been to keep state changes in memory and only write them on shut down or reboot, or as necessary when memory runs low.

 

[patrick123]

Problem is one needs to keep that online as well then.

I reckon simply trimming down the recorder is the way to go so you write small amount of state changes and that’s it.

A nicer solution would have been to keep state changes in memory and only write them on shut down or reboot, or as necessary when memory runs low.

Yep, that would be the ultimate.
Keeping it online is not too serious as HA will carry on running without it, just that time period would be missing from you history, unless you feel that pertinent info would be missed during that time period.

I doubt if they will ever have the logs stored in memory as that can grow exponentially based on what info you want to store.

 

[SauRoNZA]

Aah okay it was never confirmed for me that dropping the database connection wouldn’t make it fall over.

 

[PsyWulf]

Alternative to consider to open your storage options is to convert a Thin client pc,I bought a stack of Wyze TCs to use as Phat Pis
The memory and Sata connectivity makes up for it being bigger