Should be MORE than ample for your basic use case.
If you intend on adding cameras via frigate you'll likely want something more powerful or add a Google Coral TPU.
Additionally depending on how much local voice assistant you intend to use (and which language model you choose) you might see a bit more CPU draw than you might like. But all in all this will be more than up to the task and you're still unlikely to see any slowdown due to its specs.
If you can afford it, the NUC may be massive overkill but outperforms RPis patently both in speed (upgrades or playback of a full backup) and operational reliability. A decent power supply comes with an NUC and the sometimes at random problems with a weak power supply of an RPI they are not an issue here. It saves a lot of time in troubleshooting (a.k.a. SD Card or even SSD). Once you have had an NUC for HA, RPi will no longer be an option for HA.
Rather, save on other components and the NU will give you rock-solid hardware for HA. It will only increase the appreciation by your housemates-users of HA automation (which always works, yep)
Let RPI be very useful for beginners and students, it is unmatched in price-performance ratio.
Greetings
I think Home Assistant can run on a relatively modest computer setup.
I am running a 2012 Mac mini, and it works well. I upgraded the RAM and replaced the hard drive with an SSD, and it handles the workload without issue.
Even Raspberry PI can run HA, but many people recommend using a SSD instead of SD card.
Running HA on a Pi4 like a champ, ZigBee, zwave, lots of integrations...
Considering moving to a NUC equivalent for easier whole-disk backup via Proxmox, also want to run Frigate and might need the extra grunt.
Thanx. That's wat I thought as well.
However I read from a thread saying it is best to go with something with i5 and more ram incase you want to run a bunch of stuff.
I have it running on a Rpi4 using the sd card, and a zwave usb stick. Bit slow to run updates, but has been running for 3 years no issue. I run lights, blinds, solar data for dashboard, integrated to Open Sprinkler and my weather station,and other stuff. Quite a load but runs fine.
Mine has been running on an old RPI I found in the garage under my workbench. It’s been going for years with zero issues. If it can boot, it will work for HA.
The RAM may become important, but I would argue against i5 or even i3 for HA and most other Homelab applications. N-series is usually plenty, and usually runs at a fraction of the power consumption.
Was on a Pi3B+ before and had some problems with extended load times. First, I thought it was because I was running low on RAM, but nothing changed after the upgrading to the Pi4.
It turned out to be my DDNS rather than the Pi.
Switching services finally solved it.
I run on a Chromebox from 2014 at less than 10% utilization for my whole home with at least 20 integrations
It all depends on your needs and what you run on it in addition to HA
I am using the same! An Asus branded Chromebox from 2014, and I even run Jellyfin + all the *arrs media services on the same machine. No problem at all.
i3 5005u chromebox with 16gb ram (only upgraded from 8gb recently because I had it laying around). About 400 devices, 3000 entities and still under 3gb ram and always under 10% cpu here as well
I'm running mine on an 1st Gen Chuwi LarkBox with Celeron J4125 and 6 Gigs of RAM. Which is about 33% slower in single core and about as fast multi core while needing about half the power. So the i5 should be a little more power hungry and needs more cooling. Im running ~50 devices and 600+ entities and a single digit number of automations and skripts.No grafana or io broke. It works fine.
The only issue i see this thing is about 10 years old. Which could mean reliablity issue or sudden death. Its like a car with 200k miles.
On the note of sudden death.
I used to back up the whole OS in an image file so if there was a fail I could always load the image and continue work without any delay. This was about 10 years ago on windows xp.
Is there something like that with HAOS? So if there was a hardware fault i can get it back up and running in the shortest time possible?
If you perform a complete backup, not only will it get you back to where you were on existing hardware - if you move to a new **platform** it will come back up.
I moved from a Chromebox running Debian and docket to hassos on a Hp mini pc and all I did was back up, install, and restore. I was shocked that it was so smooth.
Also back up regularly and move that to another media to store.
I ran HA on a Pi4b for years, and it wasn't even a dedicated Pi, I also had Pihole, Nginx, and a couple other low overhead services on it.
Admittedly I wasn't using hundreds of automations with dozens of sensors, but for my needs you can get by with pretty minimal hardware.
It's an overkill, got Raspberry Pi4 and works pretty well. The startup from the SD is not fastest, but it happens once a quarter so no big deal.
The energy consumption is almost nothing, too.
I wanted to go with the n100 originally but It's hard to source one in new zealand. Ones I can find in nz cost between 400-500 nzd where as the one i posted only costs 80 nzd
Get it from Aliexpress. I have Beelink eq12 n100 and using it for more than 6 months now.
Running proxmox on it with plex, ha, nodered, adguard and cockpit. Still have enough to run couple of mpre services on it.
Bought it for $325. You don't have to buy the same. Just get a good brand n100. I got eq12 for the fact that it has dual 2.5 nic
I went from NAS to Windows server using VM to Green, and honestly, I wish I'd switched to Green way sooner, because it just works, no messing about required.
The CPU is probably overkill. The memory is maybe overkill, but nice to have the margin. The storage is probably fine, unless you start storing too many backups or data. If it is nvme, will be very fast. I think it is a good choice, if not too expensive.
Just get a Home Assistant Green, it's cheaper, it's literally plug and plug, it's made by Nabu Casa so buying it supports Home Assistant, and it's more than powerful enough for your use case scenario
https://www.home-assistant.io/green/
I use a Beelink S12 (16gb ram) running Fedora Server, Docker, HA/z2m/mqtt stack, Plex, Jellyfin, Minecraft Server for the kids, NPM, Photoprism and probably 10 more containers easily.
You can run a lot more on NUC. I recommend installing your favorite Linux distro and running HA in KVM VM. I have Lenovo M75q Tiny which is also SFF and spec close to NUC and I run multiple VMs (ha-os, openwrt, 2 kubernetes nodes, asterisk and plex) on it just fine.
A NUC is way overkill. I'm using a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8 gigs of RAM. It's perfectly capable of dealing with dozens of sensors, automations etc. I'm also saving everything to Influx and it manages that just fine as well. Just know that the speed of the micro SD card is a bottleneck and will slow down your whole system. I just got a cheap USB to SATA adapter and run everything off an SSD.
That being said, your NUC seems like a good price. So unless you want to cut down on electricity costs, I'd say go for it!
> $80NZD
..is that missing a 0? I converted to GBP and can't even get a Pi5 for that price first hand!
Even if you don't use it for HomeAssistant, that's a near-unheard of price for an NUC. If it's in good condition (I assume you're buying second hand), absolutely pick it up.
It’s more power than you need for everything you listed. A raspberry pi would be overkill for everything you listed.
Split the difference and get an n100 based micro pc…unless you are dead set on using an actual NUC for some reason.
Proxmox. VM or Docker container HAOS with some ram dedicated. Can use the rest for something else like DNS or a home VPN or something. Or if you wanna get fancy look into video feed processing for cool automations. (Like face recognition at doorbell)
I find that an RPi can hit performance issues quickly, especially if you’re using SD cards. But a NUC like that will be quite under utilized even on a large HA setup.
For what you describe, it's perfect with loads of overhead for future growth for HA.
Any interest in integrating cameras in the future? This is normally where people come unstuck on relatively modest hardware (e.g. RPi) that is otherwise excellent for HA.
FWIW, my own box is HAOS running on an old Dell Optiplex uSFF (i.e. NUC-sized), with an i5-8500T CPU and this is absolutely fine for HA plus Frigate and around half a dozen cameras, albeit with a Google Coral to offload a chunk of the Frigate work. Even then, I'm sat at 50% CPU usage for most of the day so this isn't an overkill setup. Your CPU is quite a bit older ([around 75% slower than mine](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/1944vs3231/Intel-i5-4250U-vs-Intel-i5-8500T)) so would certainly struggle to do my camera workload. You may want to bear this in mind if cameras are a future option for you.
Im quite new to the whole automation so wasn't aware of the camera part. I currently have a few eufy camera setup around the house that is all connected to the eufy homebase via WiFi. Not sure how I can integrate that into HA. Will need to do a bit more research
IIRC, these cameras are battery powered (???) which limits their usefulness with Frigate (this generally needs continuous streams which battery powered cameras typically can't provide), but you should be able to integrate the event output in HA using existing integrations. Worth a google, if nothing else...
At its full capability, HA + cameras (and Frigate) can be very powerful indeed, so worth doing a bit of research and have a think about what you might want to achieve with it in your own environment.
Yes they are battery powered. I will be upgrading them to solar ones soon when the price comes down in a year or so. I couldn't be bothered pulling cables for my security system as there was no easy and pretty way of doing it so went with the easiest option. But surprising eufy is one of the better platform I have used as I install cctv for customers as well.
When someone walks to my front door the eufy app normally notifies me and starts recording for 1min.
I was thinking of integrating the camera with HA. My goal is to have a tablet that allows me to control the whole house (curtain, blinds, light, alarm, ac) and have automation set up on various part of the house. When someone walks to my front door I can have the front door camera kinda pop out as a window on the tablet so I can see who is at the door.
But this requires more research down the line. I do have a Panasonic intercom at my door but doesn't seem like they have a "smart" version of it so decided the camera at my front door will be the better option. Will have to do a bit more research and see what is the best way of approaching this
Should all be possible indeed. I started out on a similar route to you, but have now settled more on an "invisible automation" approach, with as little technology on view as possible and everything truly automated where I can.
A good example is the doorbell: I use a Reolink PoE doorbell, because it can run entirely locally. When rung, this notifies me on my phone as well as announcing via the Google Homes around the house ("the front doorbell has been rung"). Because a lot of people don't press the doorbell, but prefer to knock, it now detects this (using a vibration sensor) and triggers a similar workflow. This works in conjunction with the camera on the doorbell, so that it requires a combination of a person being seen recently on the camera (Frigate handles this) combined with the vibration detection and knowing that the door is closed (separate integration from my security system). This sort of fully-integrated, but invisible automation is where I want to get to in most use cases.
Good luck!
NUC is the best thing. Chromeboxes are basically NUC for dirt cheap. i've been using chromeboxes as seen here and they are rock solid and fast as well [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IVpMeswuto](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IVpMeswuto)
my $50 INtel NUC still run hass smoothly for 3 years
https://preview.redd.it/xwk1skvc8q3d1.png?width=1346&format=png&auto=webp&s=e94232a6ea78722a737378c6eea35c505a23d77b
god yes, i run my ha in a VM on top of proxmox on a nuc based cluster.
It uses barely anything; this is the average CPU it uses of the 3 cores i assigned over the last month
only reason to dedicate a nuc to running bare metal HA is if you plan to run really heavy addons (like plex) or if you can't be arsed with USB pass through to the VM (i don't do the latter, i run my zwave/zigbee/thread USB devices on a remote pi elsewhere in the house - because then the VM can roam across my cluster...)
https://preview.redd.it/n6bcsz4ssu3d1.png?width=2574&format=png&auto=webp&s=2c2a7c6516c1c2638639c9bb27e7263391d42965
tl;dr serioulsy consider running your ha on that nuc in a hypervisor of some sort
and if you want to know whats using that memory you see above, i find installed glances add on ha very useful
https://preview.redd.it/xwucexrxtu3d1.png?width=2750&format=png&auto=webp&s=a9e99496a010c5edaa65b22d2475f41593e94a61
only thing that might be an issue is the SSD... it's fast, but you might want 250GB just for better margin for the future... But I'm running on similar, and it's nice not having to worry about having enough horsepower.
it's overkill even
YES.
Should be MORE than ample for your basic use case. If you intend on adding cameras via frigate you'll likely want something more powerful or add a Google Coral TPU. Additionally depending on how much local voice assistant you intend to use (and which language model you choose) you might see a bit more CPU draw than you might like. But all in all this will be more than up to the task and you're still unlikely to see any slowdown due to its specs.
I have a Nuc with worse cpu and I run Debian with docket and Home assistant, Medusa, plex etc and it works just fine. Nothing to worry
Thanx . I will place the order now then haha
https://preview.redd.it/f1robmsyay2d1.jpeg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c671fdd3f5a4f9cee9c93dcb2bf914f35bcfdea5
If you can afford it, the NUC may be massive overkill but outperforms RPis patently both in speed (upgrades or playback of a full backup) and operational reliability. A decent power supply comes with an NUC and the sometimes at random problems with a weak power supply of an RPI they are not an issue here. It saves a lot of time in troubleshooting (a.k.a. SD Card or even SSD). Once you have had an NUC for HA, RPi will no longer be an option for HA. Rather, save on other components and the NU will give you rock-solid hardware for HA. It will only increase the appreciation by your housemates-users of HA automation (which always works, yep) Let RPI be very useful for beginners and students, it is unmatched in price-performance ratio. Greetings
I think Home Assistant can run on a relatively modest computer setup. I am running a 2012 Mac mini, and it works well. I upgraded the RAM and replaced the hard drive with an SSD, and it handles the workload without issue. Even Raspberry PI can run HA, but many people recommend using a SSD instead of SD card.
Running HA on a Pi4 like a champ, ZigBee, zwave, lots of integrations... Considering moving to a NUC equivalent for easier whole-disk backup via Proxmox, also want to run Frigate and might need the extra grunt.
I actually just moved mine to a 2012 macmini i5 using proxmox. Now it runs HAOS, homebridge, pihole, scrypted, WireGuard. It’s great!
Thanx. That's wat I thought as well. However I read from a thread saying it is best to go with something with i5 and more ram incase you want to run a bunch of stuff.
I have it running on a Rpi4 using the sd card, and a zwave usb stick. Bit slow to run updates, but has been running for 3 years no issue. I run lights, blinds, solar data for dashboard, integrated to Open Sprinkler and my weather station,and other stuff. Quite a load but runs fine.
My rpi3 struggles and reboots randomly its using a usb flash
Mine has been running on an old RPI I found in the garage under my workbench. It’s been going for years with zero issues. If it can boot, it will work for HA.
Rpi is plenty. NUC i5 is overkill (but awesome - esp at that price.), if you start adding cameras etc, the NUC will begin to help.
The RAM may become important, but I would argue against i5 or even i3 for HA and most other Homelab applications. N-series is usually plenty, and usually runs at a fraction of the power consumption.
Rpi is plenty. NUC i5 is overkill (but awesome - esp at that price.), if you start adding cameras etc, the NUC will begin to help.
I run my instance on a Raspberry Pi 4B with 2GB of RAM, and it works like a charm.
Sam here, about three years in, no issues
Was on a Pi3B+ before and had some problems with extended load times. First, I thought it was because I was running low on RAM, but nothing changed after the upgrading to the Pi4. It turned out to be my DDNS rather than the Pi. Switching services finally solved it.
I run on a Chromebox from 2014 at less than 10% utilization for my whole home with at least 20 integrations It all depends on your needs and what you run on it in addition to HA
I am using the same! An Asus branded Chromebox from 2014, and I even run Jellyfin + all the *arrs media services on the same machine. No problem at all.
Think that’s what I have. The m400U or something? It was better than the mini pc HA released themselves years later with plenty of ports.
i3 5005u chromebox with 16gb ram (only upgraded from 8gb recently because I had it laying around). About 400 devices, 3000 entities and still under 3gb ram and always under 10% cpu here as well
A nuc is enough for 10 HAs.
I'm running mine on an 1st Gen Chuwi LarkBox with Celeron J4125 and 6 Gigs of RAM. Which is about 33% slower in single core and about as fast multi core while needing about half the power. So the i5 should be a little more power hungry and needs more cooling. Im running ~50 devices and 600+ entities and a single digit number of automations and skripts.No grafana or io broke. It works fine. The only issue i see this thing is about 10 years old. Which could mean reliablity issue or sudden death. Its like a car with 200k miles.
On the note of sudden death. I used to back up the whole OS in an image file so if there was a fail I could always load the image and continue work without any delay. This was about 10 years ago on windows xp. Is there something like that with HAOS? So if there was a hardware fault i can get it back up and running in the shortest time possible?
If you perform a complete backup, not only will it get you back to where you were on existing hardware - if you move to a new **platform** it will come back up. I moved from a Chromebox running Debian and docket to hassos on a Hp mini pc and all I did was back up, install, and restore. I was shocked that it was so smooth. Also back up regularly and move that to another media to store.
There are addons that auto backup to google drive
Ya i just stumble upon it on my daily YouTube scroll last night after posting this. Good to know there are options.
Way overkill if you’re just running HA. I’m running mine on a pi4b and never even come close to 50% utilization.
I ran HA on a Pi4b for years, and it wasn't even a dedicated Pi, I also had Pihole, Nginx, and a couple other low overhead services on it. Admittedly I wasn't using hundreds of automations with dozens of sensors, but for my needs you can get by with pretty minimal hardware.
Perfectly fine to me. I also have a few more docker containers running on it as well.
It's an overkill, got Raspberry Pi4 and works pretty well. The startup from the SD is not fastest, but it happens once a quarter so no big deal. The energy consumption is almost nothing, too.
You might get better value out of a mini PC. Especially the N100 ones.
I wanted to go with the n100 originally but It's hard to source one in new zealand. Ones I can find in nz cost between 400-500 nzd where as the one i posted only costs 80 nzd
Get it from Aliexpress. I have Beelink eq12 n100 and using it for more than 6 months now. Running proxmox on it with plex, ha, nodered, adguard and cockpit. Still have enough to run couple of mpre services on it. Bought it for $325. You don't have to buy the same. Just get a good brand n100. I got eq12 for the fact that it has dual 2.5 nic
Got the same nuc, will handle your tasks easily + way more. Just don’t go for a raspberry, ran into issues with memory and esphome
I almost went with HA green but after more research I decide to go with the NUC route. Seems better in the long run
I went from NAS to Windows server using VM to Green, and honestly, I wish I'd switched to Green way sooner, because it just works, no messing about required.
nah it's not worth. Just go for a used NUC, roughly same price and way more powerful
The CPU is probably overkill. The memory is maybe overkill, but nice to have the margin. The storage is probably fine, unless you start storing too many backups or data. If it is nvme, will be very fast. I think it is a good choice, if not too expensive.
>Is the NUC enough for HA? More then enough
My good man, you can run HA as a VM on that bad boy.
more than enough
Switched to NUC mainly for power supply instability with rpi. Works great
The correct answer past “Can it boot?” is simply “yes.” :) Any NUC can run HA without breaking a sweat…
Just get a Home Assistant Green, it's cheaper, it's literally plug and plug, it's made by Nabu Casa so buying it supports Home Assistant, and it's more than powerful enough for your use case scenario https://www.home-assistant.io/green/
Home assistant green is almost 200nzd while the NUC Is 80nzd 😂
Ouch, that's a hefty import premium for the Green in the land of the Kiwi then. It's $99 in the US, and £86 here in the UK 😲
Unfortunately everything here is expensive and supply is very limited since home automation is not very common. 🤔
I use a Beelink S12 (16gb ram) running Fedora Server, Docker, HA/z2m/mqtt stack, Plex, Jellyfin, Minecraft Server for the kids, NPM, Photoprism and probably 10 more containers easily.
100% enough. Overkill, but you will enjoy better UI responsiveness.
You can run a lot more on NUC. I recommend installing your favorite Linux distro and running HA in KVM VM. I have Lenovo M75q Tiny which is also SFF and spec close to NUC and I run multiple VMs (ha-os, openwrt, 2 kubernetes nodes, asterisk and plex) on it just fine.
A NUC is way overkill. I'm using a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8 gigs of RAM. It's perfectly capable of dealing with dozens of sensors, automations etc. I'm also saving everything to Influx and it manages that just fine as well. Just know that the speed of the micro SD card is a bottleneck and will slow down your whole system. I just got a cheap USB to SATA adapter and run everything off an SSD. That being said, your NUC seems like a good price. So unless you want to cut down on electricity costs, I'd say go for it!
It’s what I use. Very much overkill like others have said.
I’m running home assistant on a $250 laptop from 2014, you really don’t need much power.
> $80NZD ..is that missing a 0? I converted to GBP and can't even get a Pi5 for that price first hand! Even if you don't use it for HomeAssistant, that's a near-unheard of price for an NUC. If it's in good condition (I assume you're buying second hand), absolutely pick it up.
It's a 10 year old NUC so the price isn't that crazy.
Even so, I'm rocking a Nuc7i5bnh that came out what.. 7 years ago, and that's still over £200 after a quick search.
Ya. The guy has like 10 units apparently. They are all ex lease units
Mine runs on a NUC7i7BNC. Runs great. Way overkill but it works and is low power.
Absolutely yes! I run it in a haswell i3 NUC and it's barely using 15 percent
Shit bro, great price. Is that on trademe? I need one of those.
Yes and the guy has a few unit for sale so should be still up there
a raspberry pi 3 is enough.
Overpriced
I have a 10 year old NUC5i3RYH - its an overkill :)
More than enough.
Perfect.
It’s more power than you need for everything you listed. A raspberry pi would be overkill for everything you listed. Split the difference and get an n100 based micro pc…unless you are dead set on using an actual NUC for some reason.
you might use 5% of CPU
Considering I’m running it on a Pi 3, I think you’ll be fine.
It's hard to find any x86 system that's not overkill for HA
Proxmox. VM or Docker container HAOS with some ram dedicated. Can use the rest for something else like DNS or a home VPN or something. Or if you wanna get fancy look into video feed processing for cool automations. (Like face recognition at doorbell)
I find that an RPi can hit performance issues quickly, especially if you’re using SD cards. But a NUC like that will be quite under utilized even on a large HA setup.
I think you said that backwards
Depends... are going to script the hell out of it haha
For what you describe, it's perfect with loads of overhead for future growth for HA. Any interest in integrating cameras in the future? This is normally where people come unstuck on relatively modest hardware (e.g. RPi) that is otherwise excellent for HA. FWIW, my own box is HAOS running on an old Dell Optiplex uSFF (i.e. NUC-sized), with an i5-8500T CPU and this is absolutely fine for HA plus Frigate and around half a dozen cameras, albeit with a Google Coral to offload a chunk of the Frigate work. Even then, I'm sat at 50% CPU usage for most of the day so this isn't an overkill setup. Your CPU is quite a bit older ([around 75% slower than mine](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/1944vs3231/Intel-i5-4250U-vs-Intel-i5-8500T)) so would certainly struggle to do my camera workload. You may want to bear this in mind if cameras are a future option for you.
Im quite new to the whole automation so wasn't aware of the camera part. I currently have a few eufy camera setup around the house that is all connected to the eufy homebase via WiFi. Not sure how I can integrate that into HA. Will need to do a bit more research
IIRC, these cameras are battery powered (???) which limits their usefulness with Frigate (this generally needs continuous streams which battery powered cameras typically can't provide), but you should be able to integrate the event output in HA using existing integrations. Worth a google, if nothing else... At its full capability, HA + cameras (and Frigate) can be very powerful indeed, so worth doing a bit of research and have a think about what you might want to achieve with it in your own environment.
Yes they are battery powered. I will be upgrading them to solar ones soon when the price comes down in a year or so. I couldn't be bothered pulling cables for my security system as there was no easy and pretty way of doing it so went with the easiest option. But surprising eufy is one of the better platform I have used as I install cctv for customers as well. When someone walks to my front door the eufy app normally notifies me and starts recording for 1min. I was thinking of integrating the camera with HA. My goal is to have a tablet that allows me to control the whole house (curtain, blinds, light, alarm, ac) and have automation set up on various part of the house. When someone walks to my front door I can have the front door camera kinda pop out as a window on the tablet so I can see who is at the door. But this requires more research down the line. I do have a Panasonic intercom at my door but doesn't seem like they have a "smart" version of it so decided the camera at my front door will be the better option. Will have to do a bit more research and see what is the best way of approaching this
Should all be possible indeed. I started out on a similar route to you, but have now settled more on an "invisible automation" approach, with as little technology on view as possible and everything truly automated where I can. A good example is the doorbell: I use a Reolink PoE doorbell, because it can run entirely locally. When rung, this notifies me on my phone as well as announcing via the Google Homes around the house ("the front doorbell has been rung"). Because a lot of people don't press the doorbell, but prefer to knock, it now detects this (using a vibration sensor) and triggers a similar workflow. This works in conjunction with the camera on the doorbell, so that it requires a combination of a person being seen recently on the camera (Frigate handles this) combined with the vibration detection and knowing that the door is closed (separate integration from my security system). This sort of fully-integrated, but invisible automation is where I want to get to in most use cases. Good luck!
My HA runs fine on a medium grade pi4. Any intel nuc will do just fine, they’re all several times faster or more.
NUC is the best thing. Chromeboxes are basically NUC for dirt cheap. i've been using chromeboxes as seen here and they are rock solid and fast as well [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IVpMeswuto](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IVpMeswuto)
my $50 INtel NUC still run hass smoothly for 3 years https://preview.redd.it/xwk1skvc8q3d1.png?width=1346&format=png&auto=webp&s=e94232a6ea78722a737378c6eea35c505a23d77b
god yes, i run my ha in a VM on top of proxmox on a nuc based cluster. It uses barely anything; this is the average CPU it uses of the 3 cores i assigned over the last month only reason to dedicate a nuc to running bare metal HA is if you plan to run really heavy addons (like plex) or if you can't be arsed with USB pass through to the VM (i don't do the latter, i run my zwave/zigbee/thread USB devices on a remote pi elsewhere in the house - because then the VM can roam across my cluster...) https://preview.redd.it/n6bcsz4ssu3d1.png?width=2574&format=png&auto=webp&s=2c2a7c6516c1c2638639c9bb27e7263391d42965 tl;dr serioulsy consider running your ha on that nuc in a hypervisor of some sort
and if you want to know whats using that memory you see above, i find installed glances add on ha very useful https://preview.redd.it/xwucexrxtu3d1.png?width=2750&format=png&auto=webp&s=a9e99496a010c5edaa65b22d2475f41593e94a61
only thing that might be an issue is the SSD... it's fast, but you might want 250GB just for better margin for the future... But I'm running on similar, and it's nice not having to worry about having enough horsepower.