Embarking on a mission to revamp my Home Assistant setup, I waved goodbye to my trusty Raspberry Pi and welcomed a dedicated x86 system into the mix. Surprisingly, this shift wasn't about beefing up performance but rather about optimizing power consumption, with a side benefit of streamlining my setup and waving goodbye to my energy-guzzling Unraid NAS for most of my day.
The hardware I repurposed for this endeavor initially served as a router/firewall, boasting a generous 6 2.5Gb ethernet ports. Admittedly, it felt like overkill at first glance, but since it was just gathering dust in storage, it became the obvious choice. A quick tweak involving installing a larger SSD to handle caching for immediate media consumption sealed the deal.
Transitioning with the help of Home Assistant OS's backup capabilities was surprisingly smooth sailing. However, the plot thickened when I threw MariaDB and Nginx Proxy Manager into the mix. While sticking solely to official Add-ons would have been a breeze, my setup's complexities demanded a bit of extra finesse. Anticipating issues with MariaDB, I preemptively created separate backups, ensuring I didn't lose crucial data during the transition.
Initially, the primary backup seemed flawless, but the real challenge arose during the restoration of MariaDB. After a frustrating uninstall-reinstall cycle, sacrificing historical data in the process, things seemed to stabilize. Or so I thought. As the day unfolded, accessing the system internally and externally became a game of whack-a-mole. Blaming my Google Wifi system at first, I juggled with MAC addresses and port forwarding rules, only to realize that the real culprit lay elsewhere.
Cue the re-restoration, this time opting to hold off on installing the Nginx Proxy Manager Add-on until after manually reinstalling MariaDB. Lesson learned: sometimes, the order of operations is everything.
With the dust settled, I've seamlessly integrated my Unraid system's SMB share, granting access to a single Plex instance that effortlessly toggles between media stored on Home Assistant's SSD cache and the larger library on Unraid. The result? I can now power down the energy-hungry Unraid beast until it's absolutely necessary, saving a whopping 250 watts of continuous power consumption while only adding a modest 15 watts to Home Assistant's load.
In the end, this hardware upgrade isn't just about saving power; it's a testament to the beauty of adaptability and the joy of a finely tuned smart home setup.
The next step that I still need to investigate is learning more about Maria DB. While my current Home Assistant instance lacks my historic data that was lost in this migration, that data still exists on my Raspberry Pi. If I want to invest the time, I can probably figure out how to export the data to my current system. But alas that is a project for another weekend.
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