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Is it worth downgrading from a full size i7 box to a mini pc?

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    Is it worth downgrading from a full size i7 box to a mini pc?

    I'm running HS on a Win10, i7 2600 box with 16gb of ram and 128gb SSD at the moment.

    It's pulling about 100w at idle. Based on my electricity rate, I spent approximately $200 a year in electricity to keep this box running 24/7. So power wise it makes sense.

    The PC is in the media closet connected to the TV in my living room which used to serve as an HTPC but I now have a fire tv for that purpose.

    Main concern is reliability and availability time when power is out. With my 100w pC the ups can only keep it up and running for maybe 10 minutes before shutting down. Using a 1/10 of the power of these little 10w pc, I can do with 30min uptime which is very nice.

    But what's the reliability of these things? I build my own PC so I always pick decent component, having everything in such one lightweight box scares me.

    Going from an i7 to an Atom PC or similar with only 4gb or 8gb of ram will work with HS with no side affects?

    #2
    I've been running on a Pi2 for over 2yrs now. I really need to upgrade to a Pi3 but it just keeps humming along.

    The good thing about the smaller/cheaper boxes is that they are much easier/cost-effective to replace in the event of a disaster-recovery situation.
    HS4Pro on a Raspberry Pi4
    54 Z-Wave Nodes / 21 Zigbee Devices / 108 Events / 767 Devices
    Plugins: Z-Wave / Zigbee Plus / EasyTrigger / AK Weather / OMNI

    HSTouch Clients: 1 Android

    Comment


      #3
      New Intel iSeries mini PCs with Skylake CPUs utilize less power today. Well so do the Haswell based motherboards.

      Next desktop computer here will be utilizing a Skylake CPU with 32Gb of RAM.

      There are new Intel Atom mini box CPUs now with 4Gb of RAM that also do not utilize much power. (same as mini boxes with 2Gb of RAM).

      There are a bunch out there. Many HS users are utilizing the Intel NUC computer.

      Here purchased an Xi5A new old stock for $60. It is a dual core AMD, 32Gb SSD and 2Gb RAM low powered computer. It is one of two test HS3 computers.
      It does run a bit warm but the case is a heatsink.

      [ATTACH]64502[/ATTACH]

      All of these typically are more than $100. They run Windows or Linux just fine.

      On the ARM side you can do fine with an RPi 2-3 as Rob mentions above.

      The ARM based computers will only run Linux.

      Using an ARM based Pine64 to run HS3 in Ubuntu 64bit which is similiar to an RPi and low powered.

      [ATTACH]64503[/ATTACH]

      Next generation that I am considering moving to is the Rock64 with 4Gb of RAM and using an eMMC (instead of an SD card) for running Homeseer lite on.

      All said going to an RPi or similar costs much less than $100 versus an Intel based computer (whatever you get).

      There is a Homeseer user here that is currently running Homeseer 3 on an 8 Drive NAS box (linux) which also does CCTV, media streaming and other stuff on his Windows VBs on same box. (low powered Haswell Chipset / iSeries 3 CPU / 16Gb of RAM). (~70 watts or so)
      Last edited by Pete; November 17, 2017, 12:24 PM.
      - Pete

      Auto mator
      Homeseer 3 Pro - 3.0.0.548 (Linux) - Ubuntu 18.04/W7e 64 bit Intel Haswell CPU 16Gb
      Homeseer Zee2 (Lite) - 3.0.0.548 (Linux) - Ubuntu 18.04/W7e - CherryTrail x5-Z8350 BeeLink 4Gb BT3 Pro
      HS4 Lite - Ubuntu 22.04 / Lenovo Tiny M900 / 32Gb Ram

      HS4 Pro - V4.1.18.1 - Ubuntu 22.04 / Lenova Tiny M900 / 32Gb Ram
      HSTouch on Intel tabletop tablets (Jogglers) - Asus AIO - Windows 11

      X10, UPB, Zigbee, ZWave and Wifi MQTT automation-Tasmota-Espurna. OmniPro 2, Russound zoned audio, Alexa, Cheaper RFID, W800 and Home Assistant

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by Pete View Post
        New Intel iSeries mini PCs with Skylake CPUs utilize less power today. Well so do the Haswell based motherboards.

        Next desktop computer here will be utilizing a Skylake CPU with 32Gb of RAM.

        There are new Intel Atom mini box CPUs now with 4Gb of RAM that also do not utilize much power. (same as mini boxes with 2Gb of RAM).

        There are a bunch out there. Many HS users are utilizing the Intel NUC computer.

        Here purchased an Xi5A new old stock for $60. It is a dual core AMD, 32Gb SSD and 2Gb RAM low powered computer. It is one of two test HS3 computers.
        It does run a bit warm but the case is a heatsink.

        [ATTACH]64502[/ATTACH]

        All of these typically are more than $100. They run Windows or Linux just fine.

        On the ARM side you can do fine with an RPi 2-3 as Rob mentions above.

        The ARM based computers will only run Linux.

        Using an ARM based Pine64 to run HS3 in Ubuntu 64bit which is similiar to an RPi and low powered.

        [ATTACH]64503[/ATTACH]

        Next generation that I am considering moving to is the Rock64 with 4Gb of RAM and using an eMMC (instead of an SD card) for running Homeseer lite on.

        All said going to an RPi or similar costs much less than $100 versus an Intel based computer (whatever you get).

        There is a Homeseer user here that is currently running Homeseer 3 on an 8 Drive NAS box (linux) which also does CCTV, media streaming and other stuff on his Windows VBs on same box. (low powered Haswell Chipset / iSeries 3 CPU / 16Gb of RAM). (~70 watts or so)
        I have a dedicated Blue Iris server running a Skylake i7 6700 with 16Gb ram that's pulling about 80w with an SSD and 2 3Tb HDD. I had HS first installed on it but decided to put it on a system that don't get used much.

        With the amount of work that I'm going to have to put in for HS I'd like to put it on a dedicated machine and do a nightly backup with Acronis and if something goes wrong, I can simply restore it. The computer that it's on now is now almost 7 years old running 24/7. I feel like it's time for a change.

        For it to be worth while, keeping the PC around 10w would be ideal. I have an i5-6700 CPU and 16Gb ram left from when I upgraded my BI server to the i7, with just a motherboard I can do it. For the power difference it wasn't worth it since I don't need the upgraded performance.

        Comment


          #5
          I made the change and it was the same move. Mini pc can more than handle homeseer and the plugins. You should get several hours off a ups with one.

          Comment


            #6
            Is it worth downgrading from a full size i7 box to a mini pc?

            Here I run HS3 standard for Linux with 5 or 6 plugins on a little RPI 3. The same system has home bridge running on the OS. I built the OS for the RPI server on Raspbian Jessie Lite.

            HS3 shows the primary exe runs about 70MB with plugins the exe shows about 150-160 MB. OS does not consume much more because the lite version of Raspbian doesn't have a gui interface.

            That power draw is sweet for HA IMO. 5V by 2.1A = 10.5W. The trade off is:
            CPU code sets, you are trading Intel architecture for ARM. You are also getting lower overall system resources. You will see a difference in the CPU's architecture, frequency, and the requirements for compiled programs.

            The quad core CPU is locked at 1.2 GHz. This will limit you if you try to run more than a few apps on the system.

            Be wary of unnecessary processing. I turn off whatever I don't need. I don't run with plugins I don't actually need running. I disable "energy logging and graphing", you may even want to disable logging altogether unless you need it. I do for my network log server and brute-force defense. I host SSL encryption on a reverse proxy.

            On the RPI and look alike devices you are stuck to Linux and windows IOT core. I don't know that you can port HS3 for windows to IOT CORE, but I know that you can run HS3 for Linux on Raspbian and should only need to get a handful of ARM compiled files from the znet image.

            Not every plugin for HS3 is Linux compatible. That shouldn't deter you though. I have found with a little work I can script just about everything I want that doesn't have a plugin for Linux in a bash/shell script or by interfacing with existing resources on my network.

            RPI units you are stuck to 1GB of RAM. So you can't run a bunch of other services on the RPI at once.

            Backups are a breeze on these. I use a free disk imaging tool (win32diskimager) to copy the entire OS. I do this before running system level updates.

            I run nightly backups of HS3 (using BLBACKUP). I keep 10 days of backups on the RPI. These are then pushed to my NAS using a script. The NAS holds 90 days of backups.

            Lastly, I make a backup of my ZWAVE controller after I add new devices. These are saved to the application folder and are saved to the NAS with the application backups.

            This system allows me to recover in the event the flash media fails, the DB or application folder get corrupted (possibly from a power failure), and in the event that my Zwave transceiver fails and needs replacement.

            That said I did learn the hard way that I needed to put my scripts outside of the HomeSeer directory and back them up separately.

            All in all, I am really happy with my HS3 RPI3 server. I am considering moving to the rock64 (quad core ARM 1.5 CPU, 2-4 GB of RAM, gigabit NIC, etc) that @Pete recommended, next in the event that I get bored or need more Horsepower.

            My other option would be to consolidate my NAS, HTPC server, DVR systems, wireless controller, HS3 server, network monitor/syslog, and a new M$ home server into a VM host built on a full size PC system with multi-port PCIE NIC, hardware RAID controller, and a multi disk enclosure. I am not sure yet exactly which direction I will go.


            Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
            Last edited by Kerat; November 17, 2017, 09:54 PM.

            Comment


              #7
              I have been running HS3 on a Quantum Byte mini pc for just over 2 years and have had no problems at all. Also setup a system for my brother using a PIPO touchscreen box, makes a nice complete setup running HSTouch too.

              John

              Comment


                #8
                Personally it is the ultimate Homeseer 3 server when you can run Homeseer Touch and Homeseer 3 on the same box.
                - Pete

                Auto mator
                Homeseer 3 Pro - 3.0.0.548 (Linux) - Ubuntu 18.04/W7e 64 bit Intel Haswell CPU 16Gb
                Homeseer Zee2 (Lite) - 3.0.0.548 (Linux) - Ubuntu 18.04/W7e - CherryTrail x5-Z8350 BeeLink 4Gb BT3 Pro
                HS4 Lite - Ubuntu 22.04 / Lenovo Tiny M900 / 32Gb Ram

                HS4 Pro - V4.1.18.1 - Ubuntu 22.04 / Lenova Tiny M900 / 32Gb Ram
                HSTouch on Intel tabletop tablets (Jogglers) - Asus AIO - Windows 11

                X10, UPB, Zigbee, ZWave and Wifi MQTT automation-Tasmota-Espurna. OmniPro 2, Russound zoned audio, Alexa, Cheaper RFID, W800 and Home Assistant

                Comment


                  #9
                  Originally posted by dannieboiz View Post
                  I'm running HS on a Win10, i7 2600 box with 16gb of ram and 128gb SSD at the moment.

                  It's pulling about 100w at idle. Based on my electricity rate, I spent approximately $200 a year in electricity to keep this box running 24/7. So power wise it makes sense.

                  The PC is in the media closet connected to the TV in my living room which used to serve as an HTPC but I now have a fire tv for that purpose.

                  Main concern is reliability and availability time when power is out. With my 100w pC the ups can only keep it up and running for maybe 10 minutes before shutting down. Using a 1/10 of the power of these little 10w pc, I can do with 30min uptime which is very nice.

                  But what's the reliability of these things? I build my own PC so I always pick decent component, having everything in such one lightweight box scares me.

                  Going from an i7 to an Atom PC or similar with only 4gb or 8gb of ram will work with HS with no side affects?
                  Always thought it a little ironic running energy saving software on an i7. A contradiction in terms really. The Pi3 does a great job and yes I'm running HS3 Pro with 3 of my most essential plugins and HS3 Touch on this little beauty and it's working away silently and and practically unnoticed as its wired into the power supply on my alarm panel. All in all an energy efficient little beast.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    I have an HP mini with Intel Pentium 1.90GHz, 4gB of ram and 1TB hard drive. It performs flawlessly and is not power hungry.

                    I've had it for about two years and paid less than $100 IIRC.

                    Comment

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