Home Assistant+NAS setup

[Deuteronomy93]

Hi All

 

We're hopefully going to be moving into a new build towards the end of the year and my plan is to automate various features of the house and have a dedicated server. It will be a very long process and a lot of the work is going to be done by me from the ground up (depending on which house we get) but as part of that effort I would be able to customise it as necessary.

 

I've been looking at various videos, forums etc and it looks like the best option for me would be to have a dedicated NAS running Unraid and have HASS running virtually on it, operating 24/7.

 

I don't know if many of you have experience doing this?

 

Just wondering what your experience with this has been and the hardware you might recommend based on the requirements below.

 

I don't have anywhere near the amount of automated products I want to eventually use but have created a VM on Virtualbox to get started and play around with over the next few months.

 

For the NAS, it will mostly just be mass storage for security cameras, work projects and media which HASS can access to play music or videos in bedrooms and lounge etc.

 

My current computer which is running the VM is AMD and I do get errors like the following when trying to set up Visual Studio Code on HASS. I'm not sure if this is AMD specific etc and I do prefer AMD, but HASS is new to me.

404 Client Error for http+docker://localhost/v1.40/containers/create?name=addon_a0d7b954_vscode: Not Found ("No such image: ghcr.io/hassio-addons/vscode/amd64:3.4.1")

 

Depending on the house we're able to get based on availability etc, there would be something along the lines of the following:

• 4 floors, POE mesh wifi on each
• Security cameras on each floor, multiple outside, running via POE
• Intercom, would ping apps and sound alert in specific rooms via speakers
• Front door
  • If intercom has let someone through, front door is left unlocked for 1 minute
• Most rooms or at least floors would have the HASS app on a tablet on the wall
• Roomba+mopbot on each set with timers and notification when done to empty rubbish, fill water, replace mop
• Lights for each room
• Thermometer, underfloor heating, aircon in most rooms
  • Thermometer: If window is closed and someone is in room
    • Temp>26 = Enable aircon
    • Temp<21 = Enable heating
• Speakers in most rooms
• Ethernet in most rooms
• Blinds potentially on top 2 floors (2 lower floors are underground, 1 has skylight so could do that too)
• Fridge
• TV in each bedroom, lounge and media room (projector)
  • Each would be Smart and ideally able to access the NAS
• Laundry room, voltage detection to say when washing machine/dryer have completed
• Boiler
  • Either the boiler itself or switches would handle the modular underfloor heating
• Server closet with the master router, switch (potentially another switch dedicated for POE as not everything would need it), NAS etc.
• Some other small projects such as I would really like to build a small sauna and have a switch to start it in advance on the way home ^^
• Metrics showing my power usage, water usage etc.

 

I don't really want to butcher my wife's nor my existing setups, I do have some spare parts that can possibly work to start with.

• 6800k
• Compatible MOBO
• 16gb DDR4 RAM
• AIO
• PSU
• Crappy old Coolermaster case

 

In terms of actual questions to ask, critique my thoughts:

• Is it typically just more tried and tested to go with Intel for this?
  • I would prefer AMD but not sure if devs test their apps as much with it.
  • Power usage is quite a consideration, I do value putting more cost up front to save money over time considering it being always on.
• Would you also recommend an old Xeon to handle this sort of setup?
  • Obviously I do want to go with ECC RAM, AMD typically doesn't "validate" it on consumer products but it does run on certain systems/boards.
  • Was considering making a small closet to run this all, having an old server with redundant PSUs would be good but I would like to mitigate the noise...
• I've seen that dedicated NAS/HASS don't require a huge amount of computing power, but it looks like I would be quite a power user by the time this is all set up.
  • Would you think 8 cores, 16/32gb ECC RAM would be enough?
  • Just considering a worst case scenario:
    • Active heating/cooling on 4 floors
    • Security cameras all on
    • Lights all on
    • Music in 3 rooms using NAS
    • TVs in 2 rooms using NAS
    • Intercom rings, things are paused throughout the house and notification goes off etc. 
• I think I would be going with about 40TB of HDD in raid 1 or another safely striped option so likely 20TB of usable space, along with an SSD for boot and cache.

 

Really appreciate any thoughts on this!

 

Many thanks

[Blue4130]

2 hours ago, Deuteronomy93 said:

• 4 floors, POE mesh wifi on each

Damn, I take it that this isn't in Beijing...

[Deuteronomy93]

2 hours ago, Blue4130 said:

Damn, I take it that this isn't in Beijing...

On the outskirts at the southeast, still a lot of decisions to make regarding it!

 

If we do go with this one then we will just be buying the house as effectively a shell. The inside basically just has the doors, wiring, pipes and that's it. I've been recreating it in Sketchup to get a good idea of what we can do with it all but it'll be a mammoth task if so!

 

Wife's family are still wanting us to move closer to the city center..