Thank you both @rlkoshak and @mstormi for clarifying the issues with microSD and USB drives … I was merely showing the two options (SSD vs. Thumb Drive) to highlight the differences.
The SSD is reliable, but clunky. The low-profile USB is very ‘elegant’ but not durable … Such are many choices in life, or, as they say here, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. 
Thank you for the valuable input.
Sorry to jump in on my side and to stay in the same terminology. “Any power supply is good” is a nonsense argument.
USB power supplys sometimes cannot deal with power glitches and then the RPi will freeze. Take an Oszi and look at the quality of powersupply and you will see lots of differences.
I use a 24 V power supply on raiser cards and never saw any rainbows on the screens again nor did my RPis freeze because of power conditions.
I have an installation of 17 RPi’s in my cabinet starting with version 2 and ending with the most recent version and this is something you can see on every hardware - or all my hardware is crap.
The SSD SD argument is from my perspective ok but to just say there is no alternative than xyz lacks the perspective on the usecase.
Just my 5 ct.
It is, but I didn’t claim that. That’s almost the opposite of what I said. When you quote, quote correctly
(or give up on any ambition to ever become a minister 
):
Mind you that ‘spec’ refers to the sum of characteristics and requirements to meet.
I don’t mean to start splitting hairs, but that statement was comprising (or at least was meant to) electrical compliance in a comprehensive sense - albeit I concede it’s so compact of a statement that it’s easy to misinterpret.
And yes of course it’s a completely different (and awkward) story what the “relevant” specs are and how to find out which components comply before buying… but that wasn’t the point here.
You mean to say all your 17 Pis [before you moved them to a ‘good’ power supply] froze notably often, and that you are certain it’s always power related (i.e. no SW or other reason) ?
Hard to believe. And if that was representative, I guess we would read a lot more about that on the Inet.
I re-read my postings twice but still fail to understand where you believe I said that and in what context.
Assuming you mean the “stability use case”, SSDs are an alternative to SD cards, and ZRAM is an alternative to both of them.
There are alternatives… (The SD card is one of the alternatives, such as HDD´s etc).
Why I recommend SSD´s is because it´s way faster than anything else, even though the Rpi dont make use of the SSD many options and advantages. SSD has become VERY cheap. (not as cheap as SD cars, ofcouse). And in my opinion, it´s alot safer than SD cards (which is one of the alternatives) and its alot faster than the SD card and the traditionel HDD…
So there are at least two good reason for choosing an SSD rather than SD/HDD.
SSD vs SD card - Speed and realiable.
SSD vs HDD - Speed.
Cons of SSD - Price, but it´s a very little difference these days.
I think which is the best/worst option depends really on what one is specifically looking for. For example, in terms of software system integrity/durability, the SSD is the ‘clear’ winner. For compactness of the build, a low profile USB is preferred. For minimum power consumption, an HDD is far from ideal, Cost-wise, the SSD option is the priciest … and so on. With all these ‘metrics’, one can pick what suits them best.
Here is my setup, compact, cheap with ssd. The power supply might be a bit over the top, I admit
Great, thank you for sharing. I’m not too familiar with the two cards you have at the bottom of the picture. Are those the SSD (32GB) and its adapter?
Yes
Based on this thread I did a little bit of reading and I think that despite your specific requirements, a USB thumb drive is not a good option no matter what your criteria is. It’s:
I completely agree that whether an SDD or HDD or SD card makes sense is completely up to individual requirements. But based on what I’ve read, running the complete setup off of a thumb drive is objectively and no matter what your requirements, a bad choice. The SD card is a better choice in almost every meaningful way. That doesn’t mean the SD card is a good choice, mind you, at least without including some mitigation.
Very interesting findings that you’re sharing with us here. This shows the depth at which some on this forum are willing to go, to misspell any mis-conceptions and that is truly appreciated.
Now, few days ago, I downloaded a self-installing image of openHABian for the raspberry PI. I let it do its thing, until it got to a point where it asked that I insert a thumb drive so the whole installed directory could be transferred to such USB drive. I did as instructed (I had a Samsung 32GB low profile drive, begging to be put to good use) and did not give it much thought then. The justification given in the installation script was precisely that micro SDs are not durable, and USBs were way better.
If you guys can find which image l’m referring to, maybe that option should be removed, or better yet, give the end user the option to use an SSD drive. I’m not a fan of HDD drives as they are not robust to impacts (personal experience) and also draw more current from the PI.
USB drive does not necessarily mean a USB thumb drive. When you plug an SDD or HDD into the USB port, that too is a USB drive. And that option in openHABian is to move the install to any external drive plugged in via USB.
It’s the same option. USB drive != USB flash thumb drive. Any mass storage device plugged in to USB is a USB drive.
The latter of which as an overall statement is plain wrong. One needs to differentiate what’s attached.
But although a developer to browse the code frequently, I haven’t seen any such text to date in openHABian.
Where, when and how exactly was that displayed ?
There’s a PR coming up to reword what you get to read when you select the “move to USB” option. It now (IMHO) clearly states that you should NOT do this for the sake of avoiding SD card wearout problems and that the ZRAM option is to be used instead.
Yes, use a different platform with more processing power.
These days, I only use / supply ODroid C2 units with DietPi.
I had a great session recently, where someone was reluctant to access one of my C2 machines, because he hadn’t heard of them and didn’t know how they compared to a RPi.
30 minutes later he sent me a short message which simply read,
“Man, this thing is fast”
I am really curious to see if I can setup a small UPS on these devices, with enough power to bring down the C2 gracefully when powered down / power cut.
Ok @MDAR but this is seriously misleading.
Because there is no point in getting faster HW to speed up processing. Any RPi2 or later is way fast enough so your C2 thing may be fast but your customer doesn’t have any relevant benefit from. A C2, PC or Cray won’t switch his lights (noticeably) faster than that RPi does.
There are points about openHABian to speed up startup and to optimize caching of rules, but these are unrelated to the HW you install on.
Then again, C2 and DietPi are so off mainstream that on average, it’ll be more difficult and take users much longer to resolve problems than if they did run openHABian on a RPi(4), let alone all the other advantages of openHABian.
Umm
I have to agree and disagree.
Yes, Velbus hardware reacts at one speed, so as soon as anything sends it a command, it will react.
However, I have observed a massive performance difference when adding Things and Items. (And similar procedures)
I’ve used 2 RPi units for different tasks and while they were far superior to the BeagleBone Black units I’d used before, the C2 simply feels faster and smoother.
I’ll admit that there may not be a massive difference in the specification sheets, so in theory they shouldn’t perform wildly differently, but from my experience (and reported experience from others) the C2 just feels faster, especially the (overall) response from the web browser GUI.
As is said / inferred on this forum so many times, everyone’s setup is different, which is the absolute joy of OH.
I can only report what I see and repeat what I’m hold.
So to summarise the last 8 years of trying different combinations of hardware & software …
Would I buy another BeagleBone Black - No (other than 1 very specific use case)
Would I buy another Raspberry Pi - No (for anything)
Would I buy another ODroid XU4 - No (the mixture of small and large cores isn’t great)
Would I buy another Gigabyte Brix - Yes (model depending on the application)
Would I buy (and support) more ODroid C2 units - Yes, especially now I’ve tried DietPi
Would I advise a domestic user to look at anything other than openHAB2 - No
Now, let’s just be clear, “I don’t normally feed the monster”, so this next statement isn’t something I’d normally say out loud, but after 8 years, I’m seriously thinking I should put it in big letters on my business card.
“If we all did, what we’ve been doing, none of us will move forward”
I’m utterly sick of talking to “old school” electricians and plumbers who don’t want to consider ‘new technology / techniques’, with the only excuse of “What I’ve been doing for 30 years works well enough”.
Recently, a plumber convinced one of my installer’s clients that “he didn’t need zone valves for each bedroom”, so now the family have moved into their lovely new home, have a guess at the one big regret they have.
And where is the plumber in question?
I’m absolutely sure he hasn’t been recommended for any other jobs by that client.
But by recommending an exotic SBC with an exotic operating system to users who can barely spell “Linux”, how would we be any better than your plumber? We can barely keep up with support on a platform for which there are dozens of other forums and millions of pages of documentation written. When you or anyone else running OH on DietPi for example come to this forum with a problem that isn’t clear is caused by oh, the best we can offer is 
. We barely support RedHat/Centos/Fedora well enough.
Oh I agree completely.
“Keep it simple” is one of my golden rules.
As is “One Job = One Machine”, I don’t advocate VMs, Dockers or anything else that offers an exotic solution that combines tasks.
You’ll never see me suggesting that running a media server on the same physical machine as anything else is a good idea.
What I particularly like about DietPi is that is ‘just’ a shaved back Debian OS with a nice text UI for selecting ‘standard’ options.
Openhabian works like a charm on it.
Setting up NodeRed was the only hiccup, but I’m told that has been resolved now.
Grab a spare memory card and take DietPi for a test drive.
You might like it, you might not.
As for supporting people, if I put my neck on the line and supplied a particular bit of hardware, I’ll happily support it.
Probably for much longer than I should, but if I didn’t think it would last, I wouldn’t have offered it in the first place.
I echo @rlkoshak here. The ‘perfect’ solution is not just a piece of hardware. It is the combination of:
With the above 3 requirements, it seems (to me) the Raspberry PI is one of the clear winners.
The RPI has a long history, and if there are many clones out there (BananaPi, DietPi, … ) it is only more justification that the RPI must be ‘good’. Again, I’m open to trying few more ideas/platforms … but I’m no expert in computer science (though I wrote multiple C/Fortran/Matlab/… programs) , and only looking for something I can use.
Just to be ultra clear.
DietPi is NOT hardware, it is Debian Linux, especially constructed to be extremely lightweight, so ideal for use with software like openHAB2, that doesn’t need the extras preloaded.
I guess the name comes from it originally being created to run on Raspberry Pi hardware.
However, there’s an image for other devices, like the ODroid C2, Quad core SBC.
As well as many other SBC devices
Just click on the Download tab on https://dietpi.com/
The setup process for DietPi is one of the simplistic I have ever seen / used.
Now here’s something you don’t see in many OS websites
I run on one of those exotic setups, in a VM with Docker (though it’s not really all that exotic, there are lots of people in this forum who do the same). The RPi I do have OH running on is 100 miles away. I’m not going to replace the OS on that machine.
But this does help my point. Those who have the skills and knowledge to support themselves don’t need recommendations from us as to what to run on. And when they run into problems, they can support themselves. So the recommendation from us is going to be for those who most likely can’t support themselves.
We are not saying you shouldn’t ever run OH on anything other than an RPi. But if you do run it outside what is recommended, you are on your own for support.
