What Hardware as Home Assistant Server

[granite ocean]

So i am looking for new computer for my Home Assistant server. For now i have and Geekom Air 11. But with all my addons it runs mostly on ~75% CPU usage. I have Frigate running with several 4k Cameras.

So i am looking for a faster machine that still is power efficient as possible but can run more camera Streams in the Future. Also want more future prrof codecs for AVX for Face Detection and other things maybe later.

I think about another mini pc or maybe a NAS? Maybe UGreen NAS? Then i also have enough space for the frigate recordings.

What do you use and how much power does it use? The Geekom Air 11 uses around 30 Watt on 100% usage.

[white zodiac]

It's probably frigate using all your CPU. I would have a separate machine for that, tbh.

[granite ocean]

And what machine? Another mini pc? A NAS? I would need somehting energy efficent also

[white zodiac]

Ha itself doesn't really use much in the way of CPU. Ideally, you want something with a decent GPU for frigate, though.

You might get away with an eGPU.

I don't personally have any experience with that option, though.

[quartz socket]

i have a Beelink EQ14 for home assistant and frigate.
i run proxmox on it, with haos running in a vm and frigate running in an LXC.
i also put a coral tpu inside (although honestly usb one is easier to setup/use)
between the coral tpu and the intel onboard gpu frigate runs great. although i am not using AVX

[granite ocean]

I allready have an Coral TPU running

[white zodiac]

NAS is for storage. It's in the name. Network Attached Storage. For frigate, you need a decently strong video card. Some people combine their NAS with a powerful video card, and it sounds like that's what you want to do.. Personally, I'd rather have a more powerful system overall, and just run HAOS in a VM, while also running frigate in a container and letting it use the GPU

[granite ocean]

But that is not used for detection but for checking what has been detected as far as i know

[white zodiac]

@quartz socket 's beelink is considerably more powerful than your Celeron nuc, and has a more powerful video card. I went larger. I have an old supermicro server board running proxmox along with a TrueNAS core VM (passed the SAS controller through to it) doing my NAS stuff, a HAOS VM doing IoT stuff, and a frigate LXC with a Tesla k80. That is also shared with the Plex LXC for transcoding.