What I’d suggest, is to seperate perfomance-hungry (here: camera streams) from your openHAB physically. So you could use your “old” Pi2 for the camera streams, if that’s enough and a new Pi4/4GB (more than powerful enough).
I just want to make something clear about SD cards and power outages. A power outage does not kill the SD card. Physically it’s still just fine and can be used again. What it does do though it potentially corrupt the contents of the card. Given the nature of how flash memory works stuff you haven’t touched in years (file system tables, parts of critical services like the kernel or systemd) can be participating in a write operation and if that write operation doesn’t complete those parts of those files get lost which can lead to corruption and all sorts of weirdness.
But the key point is you don’t have to throw out the SD card. It’s still physically just fine.
When weird stuff happens and a power loss isn’t involved that could mean that the SD card has worn out. In that case, the OS and everything running thinks it’s writing stuff to the file system. There’s caching involved so it even looks like it wrote to the file system. However, it didn’t or only partially was able to complete the write and at a later time those changes get lost in part or in total. When this happens you must replace the SD card, as it means it’s physically inoperable.
That’s my opinion too. It really just depends on how much effort the user wants to put in.
I have an old laptop running DietPi and thought about installing openHAB, but realized I’d have to install and configure extra components like Fronttail and Zigbee2mqtt manually. I could also install the openHABian scripts manually, but I don’t know if they’ll work on DietPi. I could also try putting openHAB into Docker.
I’m capable of figuring these things out–I’m just not interested in doing that right now. Maybe that changes in the future, but for now I’m best off running openHABian on an RPi.
Yes, of course. A power outage just stops the writing operation, it doesn’t cause a surge that would fry the card. Thanks for the clarification, Rich!
The other recommendation I’m always giving is to use the SD mirroring feature of openHABian.
That way you will not need any SSD, nonetheless reach a better system availability level.
For rationale and details see this post.
i think I am going a bit budget/easy setup and stick with the Pi. Thx everybody for the other suggestions though. Any opinions about getting a fan in the case?
Saving 8€ for a fan would be the wrong end to save money. I wouldn‘t do that even if it might not really be required. My Pi5 runs at 0% CPU load and 44°C CPU temperature with active cooling kit.
its not about the money, but the fan might be the 1st part to fail. If there is a viable passive solution even if its a bit more expensive I tend to prefer that. E.g. as a router I have a NanoPi R4S, which runs completely passive at 27 degC (single digit load on each of the 6 cores).
I have a pi4 in an aluminum case designed to ensure significant better cooling. The drawback is that bluetooth reception worsen. I therefore added an external bluetooth receiver.
My advice is to use a fan within a Pi.
Since I installed a fan I got rid of problems because the pi started throttling almost every day for some minutes.
The fan barely ever runs because openhab usually doesn’t challenge the hardware very much.
I migrated from OH 3 on a Pi3B to OH 4 on a Pi4 8GB.
I am running the pi in the Argon ONE V2 case with the SATA expansion. I built it with the Team group 512GB SSD. Decided on the SSD from the James Chambers online SSD benchmarks. I felt Sata was not a bad choice and it is fast enough.
The fan works amazing with Argon ones passive and active cooling setup.
It was a challenge to make it SSD bootable, but it works great. It’s bootable from the SSD.
I run PiOS Bullseye 64 bit. The whole setup is very fast and stable for many months.
