Well, you can turn this into a complex discussion: reliability, maintenance efforts required, amount of community experience and support available, performance, pricing, energy & space consumption, compatibility issues with different processors, I/O boards, OS versions etc etc.
Pis are a fine tradeoff as long as you offload disk writes to take care of the SD card corruption issue. Use a USB stick and/or NAS (if you have one).
Still - and that’s true for any other server as well - as you increasingly rely on home automation, you should prepare for as many types of outages as possible.
While a SD card will crash (often), any SSD can fail, too. Or your radio stick breaks. Or your router. Or or or …
What you really need is to identify all your single points of failure, and then come up with a comprehensive HW and OS backup strategy.
See also this thread for some more hints and discussion.
While there’s plenty of options out there, I’m very seriously looking at this new board. It’s an Intel based computer, seems to have the same GPIO connector as the RPi, and is probably the same size as the Pi. This seems like a good combination - going doing the Intel route avoids (hopefully!) some issues with ARM computers with serial ports etc, it has on-board eMMC, and having a common GPIO connector is good for expansion…
It’s more expensive than a Pi, but a lot less than an NUC.
I have been running an ODROID C1+ non-stop for “54 days 20:27” now (that’s the actual output from the System Info binding, :-)) and it seems to be stable enough.
I am running everything off a 32 GB eMCC with a “standard” Ubuntu 14.04 distribution (that came with the card). I have not bothered with a USB disk since I wanted to see how it would work in the most basic setup.
Right now I am only running openHAB with a handful of bindings (and logging enabled) + mosquitto and with that the System Info binding reports 18% disk usage (it started out at 17% after installation), a little bit in excess of 50% memory usage and normally below 5% CPU usage.
Note! I used to run a RPI 2 for about a year or so. Initially it was stable and I was very happy with it, but then I started to get problems with loosing the Ethernet connection more and more frequently. When it got to a point where it could only run for a few hours, I threw it out and ordered the ODROID.
The only thing I do not like with the ODROID (and the same goes for the RPI) is the hassle with finding packages for the ARM CPU. From that point of view I would (probably) have been more happy to go with an Intel-based solution.
Thanks Chris,
This board looks very interesing! I just might order one.
And I agree on the other comment, ssd can crash, everything could. But, i want my base to be as stable as possible, from there i can start looking at failover and redundancy. Thats the plan…
I really appreciate all the comments and feedback!
Ps. We should go for a startup for dedicated openhab appliances
It is a constant topic of discussion. I see it come up at least once a week.
A USB stick is basically an SD card that plugs into a USB port. It has the same problems regarding multiple writes as an SD card does. To avoid corruption you need an external HD or SSD, or just run entirely in read only mode and use a RAM Disk for those things that must absolutely allow writing or else things don’t work.
Interesting. I’m in the process of replacing one of my Pis (original generation B) with a new Pi 3 for that very same reason. Hope I don’t have the same problem again with this one. I’ve added a bunch of new jobs for this little guy to do (running OH is not one of them though).
Finally, to add my two cents: I’m running OH (and a TON of other stuff) on an old but powerful laptop. This laptop isn’t powerful enough to virtualize my whole environment, but I am working towards Dockerizing everything so I can very quickly rebuild the machine should I have an outage or massive failure.
The problem is not with the Pi Variant but with the sd card.
I’m looking at how I can integrate all this into one single box for NAS, OH and Kodi. Anyone got any ideas? Happy with just NAS and OH but I read that some people have had issues with qnap and synology installations?
I run mine setup on a Intel NUC NUC5CPYH. It is way overkill but I wanted something reliable. I put a 40gb ssd and 4gb of ram for around 175. Well worth it for the reliability. BIOS has an option for linux and am running ubuntu server on it. Again I know it is overkill but <$200 for the controller when I have over $2000 in zwave/DSC stuff, it is very minimal.
I am using raspberry 2 and I had some performance issues at the beginning as well. This was caused by the mySQL database when reading out data for Charts. Rasperry is an amazing platform allowing you to do whatever and how you want. So i leveraged internet and i found this:
I had a problem where I thought my sd cards running openhab on a RPI 2 were getting corrupted
but then I realized it was just the card getting full with logs. I’ve since had no problems.
I’m just throwing this out there in case it can help others who think their card is getting corrupted but is just full.
I’d definitely recommend switching to a PC running Linux and save the Pis and other such devices for situations where the Pis size or other features are critical to the project. I personally bought a used PC from my local computer recycler, but there are limitless options based on your needs and budget.
It is definitely a good idea to think of it as an investment. How much are you putting into all the automation equipment and what value would you give the controller running it? I’m a NUC fan myself but really any small form factor PC with true SATA/mSATA/m.2 connectors will give you the ability to run drives designed for greater reliability and be able to expand the RAM as desired. The performance gained over embedded systems is noticeable and appreciable.
I agree with the latest comments, as a starter with OpenHab & Home Automation it might be a good idea to start your project with a RPi, because of the low investment.
However, if you are more and more connecting devices / technologies to your OH environment, it becomes more and more important to run on a more solid / stable environment than the Rpi, due to corruptions of the SD card etc.
I’ve just ordered the Intel NUC! If anyone is interested I can share my experience after installing the environment on this platform?
But, in any case I would like to thank all of you who responded to this topic. It’s quite clear that I (luckily) was not the only one with this problem / struggle.
My core / main OH2 runs on a MacMini forced to run Debian as the OS. The reason for this is that it is more close to my other OH environments that run on RPi with Raspbian.
I firstly thought to just leave the main one on RPi but very quickly realized that I would like to do more than just the OH on it. The various RPi instances (actually two) as floor hub communicate to the main through mqtt.
I believe the issue is OS keeping the files open and without proper shutdown this may lead to corruption, depending on the file system. (Some, like ext3, ext4 should be able to recover)
I suggest trying to install OpenHab on Alpine Linux, which does not sync anything to disk, you need to issue a command for this, manually.
Yes, it may mean that your changes are lost in case of power loss, if you didn’t explicitly sync to disk, but it can also keep the file system good.
We had same issue with pi 1 & 2 , forever reimaging every couple of months tried exterenally powered external drive for data with read-only OS which reduced the problem. But eventually this corrupted as well. Seems to be power related. Currently replaced it all with pi3 couple of weeks ago as heard People had less of these problems with this device. Time will tell.
).
