Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 4 with an SSD

Some time ago I decided to try out Home Assistant for the first time, and I have been very pleased with it.

My choice for the server machine was the Rapberry Pi 4 running Home Assistant OS.

At first, I tried it out with an SD card, but that setup proved to be very unstable. This seems to be the major gripe with most Raspberry Pi installations. Even with the official power supply and a proper branded SD card the system will eventually die, just because of the high amount of writes the SD card has to endure. 

In my opinion, a Raspberry Pi running from an SD card is only stable if you can configure the SD card to be read only. That is not possible with Home Assistant, so another storage medium is needed.

After the card corrupted for the third time I decided to get a small 256GB USB SSD drive, and with that the system has been very stable indeed. 

The installation method for an SSD drive is exactly the same as with an SD card. After flashing the SSD you just plug that in and connect you Pi to the power supply. No SD card needed at all.

In rare cases if your Raspberry Pi 4 doesn't boot from USB, you might have to update the firmware and enable USB boot on it. This only applies to the very first Raspberry Pi 4 devices that were shipped.

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