Credit: Corbin Davenport / How-To Geek
Single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi are an incredibly popular way of running Home Assistant. Alongside official hardware like the plug-and-play Home Assistant Green, the Raspberry Pi is the easiest way to run Home Assistant.
Now, a new change that was introduced in a November 2025 update should help make things even better.
The problem with SD card installs
The Raspberry Pi is a lightweight, power-efficient, and cost-effective single-board computer that comes in a variety of configurations. Depending on what you go for, you’ll get an ARM-based system-on-chip that’s plenty powerful enough to run a smart home, a few gigs of RAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a microSD card slot.
This memory card interface is commonly chosen as a storage me…
Credit: Corbin Davenport / How-To Geek
Single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi are an incredibly popular way of running Home Assistant. Alongside official hardware like the plug-and-play Home Assistant Green, the Raspberry Pi is the easiest way to run Home Assistant.
Now, a new change that was introduced in a November 2025 update should help make things even better.
The problem with SD card installs
The Raspberry Pi is a lightweight, power-efficient, and cost-effective single-board computer that comes in a variety of configurations. Depending on what you go for, you’ll get an ARM-based system-on-chip that’s plenty powerful enough to run a smart home, a few gigs of RAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a microSD card slot.
This memory card interface is commonly chosen as a storage medium for its ease of use and how cheap microSD cards have become. You can use the Raspberry Pi imager to easily install Home Assistant Operating System (HAOS), a method that’s even outlined in the official Home Assistant tutorial.
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Once you’ve done this, your Home Assistant server will run in an entirely self-contained fashion from your single-board computer, reading and writing data to and from your microSD card. This is where the problem lies, since Home Assistant writes a lot of data.
This is thanks to the fact that Home Assistant logs absolutely everything, which results in near constant writing to your storage medium of choice. For desktop-grade hard drives or solid-state drives, this is a problem since they were designed with this in mind. But removable media is far less resilient, which means that Home Assistant is likely to “wear out” the microSD card and bring your smart home server down with it.
Raspberry Pi 5
Brand Raspberry Pi
Storage 8GB
It’s only recommended for tech-savvy users, but the Raspberry Pi 5 is a tinkerer’s dream. Cheap, highly customizable, and with great onboard specs, it’s a solid base for your next mini PC.
New Home Assistant update reduces logging
The change affects Home Assistant Operating System (HAOS), which is one of the two recommended installation methods for Home Assistant. If you don’t run Home Assistant in a Docker container (which is very likely the case if you’re using a Raspberry Pi for this task), then this applies to your install.
In the release notes for Home Assistant Core 2025.11, project maintainers confess that logs were being stored twice on the system, which would contribute to increased wear on less resilient storage mediums. The change means that logs will no longer be written to a file in the HAOS configuration folder.
The change is contained within a November 2025 Home Assistant Core release, an update that you’ll find under Settings at the top of the screen. Just click “Home Assistant Core” and then “Update” to automatically migrate to the latest release. You should make sure that you’ve enabled backups before you do this, just in case something goes wrong, and that those backups are stored in a location that provides a good amount of redundancy (like Google Drive, iCloud, or Home Assistant’s optional premium service).
There’s no huge change to the way logs are viewed or implemented in the latest version. You’ll still find them under Settings > System > Logs so that you can troubleshoot any issues you have with your Home Assistant server.
Need more oomph? Consider a mini PC
Running your Home Assistant install from a Raspberry Pi is a popular way to add a smart home server for relatively cheap. Using an SD card as your primary storage medium is considered one of the most common Home Assistant “mistakes” you can make.
Though the latest release mitigates this problem for future Home Assistant Operating System installs, there are still some good reasons to look beyond a Raspberry Pi for your smart home needs. I picked up a second-hand Mac mini for cheap, which came with a 256GB SSD, 16GB of RAM, and Apple’s fairly efficient M1 chip.
Credit: Corbin Davenport / How-To Geek
It doesn’t sip power quite like a Raspberry Pi, but when you factor in the RAM and storage costs, it’s a great deal in comparison. It also gives me plenty of overhead to run other things alongside Home Assistant, like privacy-respecting Google Search alternative SearXNG, a Jellyfin media server, and self-hosted cloud solutions like Nextcloud.
Though this change is welcome, it’s still a good idea to migrate your Home Assistant installation away from a microSD card. Raspberry Pi single-board computers can easily be expanded with HATs, shorthand for Hardware Attached on Top, including an M.2 add-on that makes it easy to add an SSD to your Pi for around $20 (minus the cost of the drive).