Just putting this info here incase anyone encountered an issue with installing HA using nvme ssd. If it hung on "clocksource: Switched to clocksource tsc" when booting, you have to disable Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST), dell word it Intel Rapid Restore Technology in their bios. GO into the bios > System Configuration > SATA operation > change to AHCI mode (This is bios for the optiplex 3050). This fixed for me.

Thank you for keeping it fair and sharing your preferences in a convincing and productive way. Too many videos of people saying this is the best way without substance as to why. Much respect

Dude! Wow - this has to be one of the best builds and vids I have seen in years. You rock Dude. Thanks so much for the time spent setting this rig up, testing it then telling us all in so many easy steps. (and answering my prev dumb arse questions) Up and running in under couple hrs on "stupid fast" samsung 970 Evo NVMe SSD (that one also has the built in cache) on a Dell 7050 with i5 7000T. I just measured this all set up at 7-8W. Insane speed and power conservation.. Great stuff Travis! Subscriber 4 life!

Yes this! Home automation running as a stand alone appliance on a usff PC with a small UPS. Rock solid setup that is fast and not impacted by any other non smart home systems

Thanks for doing this video! I did mine on an old HP using Debian and a VM because I didn't understand how easy it was to load onto machine - this was tremendously helpful, thank you! Much appreciated!

Another great video Travis. Thanks for all your work!!

Great video! I've used both a Raspberry Pi and an i5 pc for HA. The price of the pc used was comparable to the Pi, but its performance is so much better! It may use a few extra watts, but to have it be quick and able to do additional services like Plex and frigate without noticing any strain on the system is great!

Just what I needed, I had an old repurposed (twice) HP Prolient Microserver running HA on Proxmox hard crash just over a week ago. Finally managed to get it running again but remembered this video. After re-watching I ordered a 3050. Very happy to say it took less than 2 hours from unbox to up and running today. Very pleased with the ease of restoring an image and it just finding the Zigbee and Zwave sticks. Much faster too! Thanks! If you ever make it to Northern Colorado I'd happily buy you a burger 😁

Hello, great video! This helped me in first trying out HA on the Raspberry to realize transiting to the Dell Optiplex was the configuration I was looking for. Copying over the configuration from Raspberry to the Dell was totally seamless. Thanks for taking out the time to create this video.

The "T" means the chips is designed to use less power while also having less performance than the standard chips without any letters. The "U" means the chip is designed for laptops and mobile devices, as "U" chips are Intel's "ultra-low power" models.

Thanks for doing this video. I just ordered my 3050 last night to start doing my first smart home and first HA

After listening to the other smart home channels I listened to you for about 5 min and I'm thinking, "I like this dude" def subbed brother can't wait to learn it all.

Thank you! with this video I installed HA in a Lenovo M93P, and it's working beautifully. Great video!

I switched to an old HP thin client from Raspis. Better performance, a power cable that doesn’t get connected and hardware clock. Proxmox allows a searx install, PiHole and HA to all run in their own space.

I was searching high and low, Thank you Bro !

After stumbling through various videos promoting fruit machines, I followed this setup and was successful. Very pleased. Thank you.

Thanks for this, I wasn't aware of Frigate (must have been living under a rock!). Your video spurred me on to order a Dell 3050 like yours on eBay today. I have been running HA for many years on a Virtual Box VM, but it didnt cope too well with trying out Frigate with 6 cameras today! Really excited to get the the golden unicorn of the Coral device sometime in the next 20 years.

Great video, really easy to follow. I'm going to get into Home Assistant for the first time, but was put off by the lack of Raspberry Pi available. I'm going to go down the thin client route thanks to you!

Great job for dumbing this down for me. This was the 10th video I watched and now I have a great understanding.

Great Job as always.

Great video as always Travis. Keep it up

Great video! Love the Dell OptiPlex micro form factor. I use mine to run ProxMox with HA and everything else in containers. If you go just one model higher 3060/XX60. You will get intel vPro which is AMAZING! It’s like a built in PiKVM. I personally prefer the 7060. Simile price point on EBay and you get more horsepower and vPro.

Good video, thanks. Moved from RPi to Dell-Wyse 3290 thin client with 8GB RAM/64GB mSATA. Works like a charm. Bonus: fanless! (Less than $75 total)

Find the clock ticker when booting your system super interesting as I always wondered whether my system is slow or fast. Your Dell setup did the booting of HA in 51 secs, I get 53 secs on my QNAP NAS - seems to be not so bad, after all... Great video, thanks

Wow. Great Video. I have ordered Home Assistant yellow and it will be shipped 6 months from now. I was afraid of building one but with this video I just purchased the Dell 3050, Zigbee dongle, Z-wave dongle and the M.2 drive. Looking forward for hours of fun.

Running mine on Proxmox on Macmini 2012 i7 16gB RAM 512gB SSD. Runs great!

I just purchased an HP Prodesk 600 G2 ( i5-6500T, 8GB DDR4, 2.50GHZ, 120GB SSD) Mini PC on eBay, added 32GB Ram, all for about $250, and still have an option of upgrading the hd to pcie ssd. It's a little smaller in size than your dell and runs my ha along with other vm's all on proxmox. It was a great upgrade for me.

I was working on an OptiPlex 3050 as this video came up. I definitely want one, and a Zigbee dongle. Should blow the chips off my pi 3 Homebridge setup! Great video!

Great video, few problems that I ran into, but got them all squared away.

Thank you for this video. I am going to start setting up an HA server and was looking for the best hardware for it. Many KZfaq videos say that the best is a raspberry Pi or the HA Yellow. But my experience with the raspberry pi told me that it was not the best option until I saw your video, as you say it is more economical and powerful to go on ebay and buy the parts on your own, than to buy the complete package.

Sometimes people, especially tinkerers, over-complicate installations. Sometimes something simple is all that is needed, even to tinker on. HA Yellow has its place and it really depends on what you use it for. I use the Odroid based HA Blue box which works pretty well. It all depends what you want to do with it. A Home Automation device is not the type of thing you will be constantly rebooting. Once they are running, there is little difference in the end user experience. I know a lot of optimisations have been made since you made this video so boot times are a lot better now on Pi 4 and Odroid based systems, but will never quite match a full PC.

Awesome hardware choice... I just built my HA box... OLD pc Pentium 3 AMD-64. Docker-compose setup. For a dual core with only 2 gigs of ram it rocks!!! So antique I had to load Ubuntu from a dvd...😁 Nice to know there is powerful stuff like this that still uses a tiny amount of power to run!!! Much better than raspi for this task, and I am a Pi fan... I also built a media platform just for HA... An OLD model b pi running kodi with no addons installed. It's connected to a bluetooth speaker via 3.5 MM audio jack and as a bonus..... It has my music library scanned into it... I can use it as an audio system via Yatse (as controller).HA messages interrupt playback so I always get prompts.

I will have to try one of those when I outgrow my raspberry pi. The pc is cheap enough. I do like having all the options for disk drives with faster interfaces.

Great video I’m at more of a Apple HomeKit guy as of right now but the way it looks I might be switching to home assistant just because of the customization that you have control of so definitely watching videos trying to learn more about how to get home assistance started up before I dive in

Those Dell Optiplex Micro's are great!!!

Wow! Thanks 🙏

Thanks Travis.

Until recently I used a Raspberry Pi 3b+. It was doing OK, but I didn't like the SD card corruption that occasionally happened. Now perfectly happy with HA running on a HP T630 Thin client. Much faster, no sound at all (fanless) and it did cost half of your setup! Which is great btw.

Hi Travis, great tutorial, somehow you manage to answer questions in the videos before I even think of them, but do you think this project be done on a laptop, for example a Dell Precision M4700, to get the advantage of the battery (built in UPS so to speak), screen and keyboard?

Thanks great video. Would like to see the different between all the installs pro/cons

Man, your nailing it!

Hey, thanks for great video. Just got a optiplex 5050 i3 thanks to you instead of a raspberry pi. There is sata sdd 256 GB installed right now and I'm considering to upgrade to NVM sdd. I'm totally new to HA and don't know really how much space I will need. Any recommendations? Is sata sdd 256gb enough as a start or should I start with more space?

Decent video with some really good points. I'm using an HP EliteDesk i5 system for my Home Assistant installation. I do run Windows on it so I can run BlueIris camera software as well. Home Assistant runs on VirtualBox. I agree that an actual PC does run the system faster as is, but I also found a speed increase by using an SSD instead of a spinning drive. (You'll get the same, probably even better with an M.2 SSD like you used in the video.) On the whole, I'd rather go the route you went installing a "native" OS rather than running on VirtualBox if I didn't also need BlueIris.

Raspberry PI with SSD works very well. I believe the bottle neck with the PI is the speed of the storage ( SDcard).

Awesome video great hardware and value for HA OS! Any plan to do a full walk though of HA on unraid and remoting in with reverse Proxy?

When I started HA I ingested RPi 3+ but in a few weeks the quality SD card went out! Moreover, the RPi got restored when copying ESPHome! I was wondering what device, finally I chose the ODROID N2+ 4GB RAM 64GB eMMC storage! Absolutely sufficient and powerful device! (Same hardwer used by Home blue) A new even better device came on the market ODROID M1 8GB RAM and the possibility to insert SSD storage! I think it's more competition to Home yellow!

It's worth trying this in a virtual machine before buying any hardware, just so that you can easily start over as many times as you need to when tinkering. It should also be good enough to decide whether this is even right for you. It's not a good long term solution as you have to leave the computer running the VM on whenever you're using it, but for testing that's fine.

Great video! Don't know why but somehow i was afraid you were gonna praise the raspberry pi! Maybe because most youtubers do!? I absolutely i agree, next video: install proxmox and howto run HA in a VM :)

Great video! Is there a reason why you didn't install HA on the SSD that came with the 3050?

Love the information. I'm new to trying Home Assistant. What is the minimum size computer specs does it need to run home assistant? I see all kinds of thin clients from 1.7-3.5 clock speeds, different chips, I3-I5 CPUs. Thanks

Amazing stuff, thank you It’ll be amazing if you get the full frigate and z2mqtt setup going on this machine 👍

Another well explained video! Thanks Travis! If I moving my install from a Raspberry Pi to a Dell 3050 and I restore from a previous backup would I just then change my router to point the Dell 3050 to the same reserved IP address that the Raspberry Pi pointed to?

Thank you for this video. I have been pondering about this for some time ... I have tried a few different configurations: 1. Raspberry Pi 3 - this is where I started, super reliable and easy to setup ...booted every time and was stable for the longest time but as I added stuff it would take longer and longer to boot. I did not experience the SD card failures that people reported as I probably didn't run it long enough. I decided to migrate to the next method 2. Home Assistant on Virtualbox on Mac mini. I had a Mac mini running as a mini server for some time and Home assistant ran very fast on it in the background on Virtualbox. But for some reason the computer would hang after a couple of weeks of running untouched. The fans would run constantly and the Mac would be completely unresponsive. It would only seem to do it when running virtual box so not sure if it is a virtual box issue. So I decided to run on my Synology NAS: 3. Synology NAS. Not all Synology NAS can run docker (there may be some hack way to do it on non-supporting models) Mine was a 1812+ (2018 model). Home assistant was simple enough to install and has been super reliable. But it does not allow you to install the supervisor version. I also decided that I did not need to have my NAS on 24 hours a day. It consumes a fair amount of energy and is quite loud with 8 bays running and fans blowing. I can turn it off and if I need to use it, I just do a wake on lan command, use it and then can shut it back down. So I needed an always on device. 4. I saw this video and bought a Dell 3050 from Ebay and power supply and SSD from Amazon. I struggled with the TSC clock error mentioned. I did not check back here for a solution unfortunately. Just tried to change a bunch of settings .. to be honest I don't recall which ones and rebooted and it was fine. Had to do it a few times. It seems to work well. Doesn't boot from "cold" as fast as the Virtualbox version but seems to be good and stable. I have not had to reboot for about 3 weeks now. Seems like overkill to run only home assistant on it, but the hardware was pretty inexpensive. I would probably have bought the Home Assistant yellow version but looks like they won't be in stock for a long long time and the others just seem like slight upgrades to Raspberry Pi. This seemed like a sensible alternative. I didn't feel like experimenting too much so just followed this and it's great! Thanks! I will probably add a z-wave stick for some of the legacy devices I have and add more devices and will be good to go!

Great video very well explained. I just bought this machine used to install Home Assistant on it. My use will be temperature readings, actuators and video security. The machine will come with 4 GB of RAM. Should I increase the memory, and how much do you advise me to put on this Dell Optiplex i3 7100 T? Thanks ! Alain Hervais

Thanks for this. I just bought the same Dell based on your video. Hoping you can answer a quick question. I know you connected your SSD drive to your Windows computer via the dock (and USB). But I have an ExpressCage MB322SP-B, which is an SSD docking device for my server case. It's easy to swap an SSD inside. The problem I'm having is at 15:38 of your video. When I press Select Target, my drive doesn't appear. I suspect it's because BalenaEtcher is trying to protect me and now allow me to choose an internal drive. Is that correct? I don't even have that option to "Show Hidden". What do you think? If my theory is right, is there anything I can do to the SSD drive to get Etcher to allow me to choose it?

Do you have power usage for when HA is fully setup and running?

Thank you for the great video, been looking for a good and solid HW option to switch to. Been using VM for past 2 years but it's time to switch! My only question is, how do you install something alongside this if you're running HA OS?

I would add that I'm seeing more Optiplex units with I5s on eBay and not the I3s and you really need to check Dell support and the manual for the unit to determine if it supports the nvme ssd. Some of the Optiplex models do not. I'm getting a good deal on a Dell OptiPlex 3050 USFF Intel i5-7500T 2.70GHz 8GB RAM 256GB SSD... Fingers crossed. Any advice on performance difference between the standard SSD and the nvme ssd?

Great video. Subbed! Got my small pc up and running with the NUC version of home assistant. Quick question, looking for a restart and shutdown function in HA. Can you point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

Love this build!!! ❤. Instead of the ssd, like you said, if for example you put in a 2tb hard drive, how would you get Frigate to use that , rather than wear out your m.2 drive? Cheers

Didn't notice if you said so, but is there a reason for going for the flashed version, and not install HA in WIndows on the Dell? Have recieved my Dell 3050 today, and is about to start doing this. Don't know why, but all the way thought I would go with the windows version of HA.

very useful, thank you.

I have been running HA in a proxmox setup I have running on an old PC. After seeing my electric bill I decided that I need to go green. I bought a Dell 5070 on eBay for less than $50, waiting for it to arrive in the mail.

So I have a vera plus that's several years old and of course discontinued. I'm looking to maybe move over to a setup like this. Especially since I have about 60 devices and sooner or later my vera will die and I'll be in a pickle and have to start from scratch anyway. All my devices are Zwave. If I went with a setup like this what should I use for the Zwave connection? Just plug a aeotec z-stick into this pc? Or is there a different dongle or hub I should go for?

Great video :) Though I have to mention that you seem to exaggerate the slowness of the Pi, since once it is setup it will run just fine and not feel slow (restart or restore from backup I agree will always be slow) Could you maybe share your criteria for choosing the small PC? I've been looking at Aliexpress too, and what worries me is that I have no basis for comparing the low power Intel CPUs since I've never used a computer like that. So how do you "make sure" the CPU in the PC you buy is powerful enough for your needs?

Somewhere you say that when with that Dell you can later on also install other things like proxmox etc. but if you install that generic Home Assistant OS I believe you can't put anything on the device anymore other than from within Home Assistant (so the plugins/addons etc, of Home Assistant itself). Right? Or can you still install separately Portainer or something?

Is it correct to say that the HASS OS installation option will only recognize external USB connected storage? I haven’t had any success getting it to recognize any internal storage other than where the OS is installed. Apparently FSTAB is read-only. (Which would make sense for Nabu Casa. The single board computer HASS OS solutions they sell don’t have multiple internal storage disks and USB 3.0 is comparable to SATA III. And those of us repurposing servers have the hypervisor/container option which hides the actual hardware from HA.)

I use either the first, or I believe second Nuc. It has an I5, 16GB of. RAM and a mSata drive. Both the HDMI and display port outputs went out. Glad I'm a pack rat because 8y was compatible with Home Assistant. It probably sat around for 2 years and it's been running HA for 5+ years I believe. I still ordered a yellow but part of that is because this thing isn't going to be around forever, it's getting old. I used a USB adapter to image it with Etcher and then restored my backup from my pi 3. It was night and day regarding performance.

Gracias por el video, thx.

Hello Travis, if the power goes down, will the home Assistant start up automatically when power is back on?

I've spent probably over a dozen hours trying to figure this out over two days and I have to give up for now. There's nothing else I can even think of to try.

Hey Travis your build here is the best yet!!! Rock solid for months. You mentioned maybe being able to use that fixed hard drive space later on for recording or whatever. I'd like to use it to playback music using HA directly. Either via media browser or the HACS available music assistant. Would you be so kind as to make a vid how to format, add a HDD into that space using the linux version that HA uses here.. also how to samba into the drive so can add/remove files etc. That would be awesome! Wap

Sorry to trouble you again dude, what format to use on the NVMe drive? FAT32 Ext 3/4 (or NTFS?)

Just purchased a Dell optiplex 9020m i7 16gb ram with WiFi, Bluetooth, 1gbe network, ssd and a m.2 sata drive for cheap locally! Used the Sebrent usb case and transferred my existing HA from the rpi4 to pc. Not done transferring the z2mqtt yet but so far it was a breaze! Would def be interested on how to setup an nvr on a separate ssd on the same system! Thanks for the vids

I have a gaming laptop sitting around that is unused now. Would you recommend using something like that? Load HAOS or use a virtual machine on it?

I started HA on Raspberry pi and Orange pi, unfortunately after a few months the data on the card was corrupted, now I have ASRock Q1900-ITX with Openmediavault and Docker has been running for a year and something without problems.

Great video, need a bit of explanation about using GPU to offload frigate. Thank you

Thanks for the info, do I need Wi-Fi or Bluetooth on my computer to install or operate the home assistant?

Two things for an appliance that is left on 24/7. 1 reliable 2 low power. Basic rule of thought, if you turn off a light when you leave a room the power for that light is significant. Yes an I3 is more capable/ powerful but are you using the extra capabilities? That is an individual question and there is no answer that fits everyone. My HA runs mainly lighting so I will keep the lowest possible solution I can.

I installed it on a virtual box image on windows 10 with an SSD drive. It works well

Managed to buy the same Dell model with 12GB ram. Did you install HA on the system itself or on an Hypervisor (proxmox,esxi) etc ? I feel like that the I3 and 12GB of ram is overkill for HA alone.

I discovered HA when replacing a hard-wired alarm panel. Definitely need the GPIO pins from something like an RPi for that. Plus it does home automation too.

If my machine comes with windows installed do I have to uninstall windows first somehow? Or does this run in tandem with windows? You do the install process on another computer to the SSD, right? Then install the SSD to the Dell. Then startup directly to BIOS so we never actually go into Windows OS? So now HASS is installed on the Dell, but you don't use that computer after that? Just go through another computer in the browser and type in the IP? Sorry, so many questions. I just ordered everything, and this will be the third machine I've ordered trying to get this right. It's been a struggle so far to say the least. I also need to figure out how to add a wifi board. Not sure where to start.

Are you able to run home assistant and the hard drive for your security recordings at the same time? How does that work?

is this guide will be same for mini PC? plus what is the diff between run in the VR machine.. n install HA as OS like this? i am thiking to buy mini pc like beemax to run HA and this mini pc to act like my home server for NAS and so on.

Which Zigbee dongle is currently recommended with this set up?, and does HA automatically recognise all zigbee devices plugged into this NUC as it first boots up? Thanks

I have a cluster of hp g1 mini desktops running proxmox and docker swarm. They perform amazingly well and have 2x m.2 slots as well. Just wish there was more Ethernet options

Great video. I currently have HA running on a VM in Windows 10 on a NUC. Definitely not the best solution as Windows 10 causes some instability issues. I think this would be a much better solution, however, I do use the NUC as a Plex server so getting a dedicated second hand PC might be the way to go.

What do you think of the Wyse 5070 Thin Client versus the 3050's? Refurbed on Dell they're only around $114. Not sure if it has the right slot for an NVME drive.

I'm working at a computer store and they had an old laptop with broken hinge and cracked screen. I removed the screen from it and installed an SSD with Hass OS on it. It's a 6th gen i5 with 8gb of ram. Works absolutely perfect

Thanks for all the help I now own 2 Dell 3050 one all in one the other Mini. Questions after some review it appears that the second looking M.2 card (mini) is truly only used for WIFI it appears to have a 1630 plug (e) style. Have I misreading something.

awesome, thanks!! I'm looking to switch from a pi to a PC... Can this be done from a usb3 external ssd (Samsung T7 for example)? it seems like that would be similar to usb boot from a pi to avoid the sd card courruption issues... thanks for the info!

I thought I had to use an official IntelNUC to use the HA NUC image. But NUCs are not cheap. This is what has held be back from going the NUC route.

As someone who already has an Unraid server, I find it super usefull to just run Home Assistant on that. Works like a charm. I tried a docekr when I first tried HA, but since there is no supervisor I went ahead and skipped that. I just made a VM with HA-OS which runs fine. Currently on 2-Cores and 4GB of RAM. I have 40 cores (dual CPU server) and 128GB of RAM available, so almost all dockers on my server, get a good amount of horsepower. Unraid, is LOVE.

Will a HA software backup on this set up work in the future on other platforms (like the Raspberry Pi)? Thanks

No way! I just ordered a 7050 i5-6500 version off eBay yesterday! Any reason you went with a dual instead of quad core?

Orange pi 4 LTS 4GB with 16GB eMMC would be a good choice too

What do you think is best for home assistant and the app that integrate home assistant and Apple home kit?

Interesting trivia... Last one I bought for blueiris use changed its MAC address after a power cut when the mobo lithium was dead. DHCP was tied to the MAC and it took me a bit to realize why I couldn't connect remotely. 🤦🏼