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.
Is my Dell poweredge Xeon CPU 32gb ram 2tb HDD overkill? 
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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.
Yes! 
I used rPi4 up to the point that my Deconz installation ruined my Bluetooth. Since I use both and couldn’t solve the problem, I got myself Intel NUC
Is openhabian working with: Argon ONE V3 M.2 NVME PCIE Case (PRE-ORDER) – Argon 40 Website Store? i.e. can I boot from the SSD?
Will it work? Probably. Will it be a supported configuration? No it won’t. So you might find support on the forum limited.
How much worse is the CPU and memory load when using docker on a pi4?
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.
Yes, you can. Booting from PCIe (NVMe SSD) and USB (NVMe bridge for SSD) is officially supported by Raspberry PiOS.
After flashing the SSD on your PC (and before the first run on your Pi) add this to the end of /bootfs/config.txt:
[All]
# Enable PCIe external connector
dtparam=pciex1
So its supported by PiOS but not openhabian.
Not sure if im gonne get the SSD now or not…
If you are comfortable installing stuff yourself, you don’t need to use openhabian to run openhab.
But openhabian does seem to make it very easy and convenient. As suggested above, there isn’t really any concern (speed, reliability) with SD card + openhabian. So unless you need to run other stuff on the pi, probably easiest to stick with SD card + openhabian, and perhaps get another pi with SSD for your other stuff, maybe?
Bottom line, if you have problems in getting your SSD to work there are a few users who do not want to support you. The rest certainly tries to help you.
For openhab related questions the fact that you run your OS on an SSD does not matter (in the same way as if you run openhab on a Windows PC from an SSD).
How would you flash the SSD on a pc? I dont think i have a (spare) NVMe slot…
Just buy a SSD M.2 NVMe Enclosure USB 3.1 to PCI-e. It costs about 5-20€
My take on it is that you should have a hardware backup as well as software backups. So I own two odroid n2+ as two full sets of hardware. This way if I have stability issues I can swap out power supplies and each piece of hardware to rule out the hardware as the cause. Having a second one means you can test releases before moving your main openhab to the release you have tested. Since openhab has been very good in this area I have stopped doing this and the spare just sits around or gets used for other testing.
Choose if you want to use containers or hardware. Work out what level you are and if you do not want to learn Linux, then stick with openhabian and what they recommend.
You can also install armbian and have their installer get openhab running very easily, so this opens up more Arm boards. Just do not trust any claims openhabian works for other boards, if you go out on your own then you need to do your own support and asking here or using google will get you by just fine.
Some people like to use containers, and then it makes sense to get a server that costs more to run as you can then use it to run multiple projects in containers all sharing the one server. This is worth considering as many new projects are coming out that offer a docker image as a quick way to get the project running.
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+1 LOVE THIS idea!
I have a cold spare 24-port layer 3 network switch/ router for this reason.
Unfortunately it is too expensive for me to have a second server ($4k-6k) that’s just going to be sitting around unused (powered off even) as a spare, getting obsolete meanwhile.
My solution for that is to buy a preemptive replacement upgrade every 3 years or so before anything happens, and use redundant parts like dual PSU, spare HDDs, multiple backup copies of data etc.
So that’s one benefit of using a cheaper SBC like a pi. Having two copies of the hardware isn’t too expensive.
I view my RPi3 (which serves as my print server) as my hardware backup for openHAB. If the RPi4 died, I’d just have to take the SD card out and put it into my RPi3 to be back up and running in a few minutes.
I had just assumed I’ll do the same thing with an RPi5 in the future, but it occurs to me that an m.2 SSD can’t be moved to the older RPi4.
This is really it. I’ve learned just enough to get by in Linux, but it’s not really where I want to focus my time and energy. So, I’m better off sticking with openHABian on an SD card. I might feel differently if I had experienced a lot of SD failures in the past.
My 2cents:
- For everyone, who knows hardware and OS in deep: use whatever you want, you’ll get it sorted anyways.
- For those, who don’t know hardware and OS: use openHABian with SD card
ad1:
you’re a pro. but don’t expect much support here in the forum as there’s a bazillion of possibilities, which can - and probably will - interfere in installation and integration into openHAB. openHAB is a web application - but the app is dependend to OS-level bindings or execs, or …
ad2:
if you don’t want to make a big head on how to run things - download openHABian and use it. It will take care of all the hassle of installation, integrations and operation of the web app as is. including solutions for monitoring and other helpers.
Plus: it comes ootb with backup/restore and migration tools.
which brings me to the “redundancy”-problem. If you’re a pro and use solution 1 - you should know how to deal with problems on hardware, OS and perhaps a bit of application level. You’re good. openHAB leaves you enough room for that. Install it on bare metal, in docker, kubernetes or proxmox - you’ll deal with it. Then you can deploy your new openHAB including restoring your data in no time if there’s a problem or even have HA-solutions in place for that automagically.
if you don’t want that - fine. openHABian helps you with that. you can clone your SD card regularly to a spare SD and plug it in the next Pi if there’s a hardware problem (I’ve got a bunch of Pis from the beginning - and still not a single one died on me since years!) or if the SD Card wears out. You can pro-actively change SD cards every bunch of years - or rely on your backup strategy (also openHABian functionality).
So, my 2cents. and most importantly my 3rd cent: Make up your mind (and possible free it!) on how you use a smarthome in principle. My definition e.g. is: my home mustn’t be dependend on my software. It works without it. openHAB (as any smarthome-software btw) is only there for convenience. If for some reason or another I can’t have my openHAB for days - I’m still be able to heat my house, turn on/off light or anything. Of course, it’s not as comfortable and I have to manually (eeeeh) press light buttons and stuff - but it works. no need for “booting from a SSD because I heard, SD cards only last a month” or so.
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