I ran Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 4 for two years. It worked, mostly. Then I switched to an Intel N100 mini PC and I am never going back.
The Pi Problem
The Raspberry Pi 4 is fine for a small setup. But once you add a database (for history), a few integrations, and some automations that run every minute, you start hitting the ceiling. My dashboard took 8 seconds to load. Automation triggers had noticeable delay. And the SD card corruption risk was always in the back of my mind.
The Mini PC Upgrade
I picked up a Beelink Mini S12 Pro with an Intel N100 processor for about $150. 16 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD. Running Home Assistant OS in a VM via Proxmox. The difference is night and day.
Dashboard loads in under a second. Automations trigger instantly. I can run Zigbee2MQTT, Node-RED, Grafana, and a full MariaDB database simultaneously without any lag. Power consumption is about 10 watts – barely more than the Pi.
Is It Worth the Extra Cost?
A Pi 4 with case, power supply, and a decent SD card runs about $80-100. The mini PC was $150. For an extra $50-70, you get 4x the performance, proper SSD storage (no corruption worries), and room to grow. If you are running more than 20 devices, the mini PC pays for itself in reliability alone.