Beginner: Choosing Hardware for Home Assistant (Pi, Mini PC, HA Green)

Getting started is easier when you pick a stable, right-sized platform. This guide helps you choose between HA Green, Raspberry Pi, a mini PC/NUC, or a VM/NAS—and what to buy for radios (Zigbee/Z-Wave), storage, and networking.

Options at a glance

• Home Assistant Green
  • Pros: Turnkey, quiet, low power, officially supported. SSD storage, reliable.
  • Cons: Lower raw CPU than a mini PC; fewer expansion options.
• Raspberry Pi 4/5 (with SSD)
  • Pros: Low power, huge community, flexible.
  • Cons: SD cards fail—use USB SSD. USB/Wi-Fi interference can impact radios.
• Mini PC / Intel NUC
  • Pros: Fast, tons of headroom for add-ons (Frigate, databases, LLMs).
  • Cons: More power, slightly more setup.
• NAS / VM (Proxmox/ESXi/Hyper-V)
  • Pros: Consolidate on existing gear; snapshots.
  • Cons: USB passthrough for radios can be finicky; networked (Ethernet/PoE) radios help a lot.

Radios (Zigbee & Z-Wave)

• Zigbee: Prefer Ethernet/PoE coordinators so you can place them away from servers and Wi-Fi noise. SMLIGHT SLZB-06/06M are widely recommended by the community for reliability and placement flexibility (via PoE).
• Z-Wave: Choose an 800-series adapter (e.g., Zooz ZST39 LR). Use a 3-foot USB extension to reduce interference.
• Placement:
  • Zigbee coordinators do best in a central location; PoE makes this easy from any HA host.
  • Build a backbone of mains-powered Zigbee routers throughout the home.

Storage & power

• Prefer SSD over SD cards for reliability and speed.
• Use a UPS (even a small one) to prevent corruption during outages.
• Keep nightly backups; store a recent copy off-device.

Suggested starter shopping list

• HA host: Home Assistant Green OR a quiet mini PC with SSD.
• Zigbee: PoE coordinator (e.g., SLZB-06/06M), Ethernet run to a central spot.
• Z-Wave: 800-series USB stick + 3-ft USB extension.
• Network: Solid Wi-Fi + a PoE port or injector for Zigbee.
• Power: Small UPS for the HA host and PoE switch if possible.

When to scale up

• Running Frigate video analysis or experimenting with local AI? A mini PC with Intel iGPU (OpenVINO) or an NVIDIA GPU box is a better host.
• Large installs (100+ devices) or many add-ons benefit from more RAM/CPU and SSD IOPS.

References