A few weeks ago I decided to play with Home Assistant. I immediately fell in love with it. It solved several problems I had with my mixture of devices managed by Alexa. Within a week I had a fairly extensive setup with all my Tula, ZigBee, Wyze, Third Reality, and Aqara devices working perfectly! I somehow managed this without totally pissing off my wife and kids by breaking things along the way.

I set it up on a spare Pi-4 I had laying around. Of course, it was setup on the SD Card since I didn't know any better. After reading horror stories about failed SD Cards, and realizing it would take quite a bit of time to reset everything up should the card fail I decided to move it to a SSD Drive. Besides... I love to tinker.

I should note that I'm using the dedicated HASSOS version. I did not want to get into managing Docker myself... at least not yet. That might be a project for the future.

Checking the forums here on reddit and elsewhere it appeared this was not as easy as it sounded. Now that I'm done and everything is working I realized people are making this move much more difficult than it needs to be.

Here's how I proceeded:

1. Purchase an Argon One M.2 Case and a Kingston 480GB A400 M.2 2280 Internal SSD
2. Install the SSD into the Argon Case
3. Connect the USB port for the drive to my PC using a USBA to USBA cable.
4. Use Balena Etcher to install a fresh copy of HA to the SSD Drive.
5. Manually setup the Wireless Settings (This step could have been skipped if I could have found an unused Cat-6 Cable)
6. Create a Full Snapshot of my existing HA install and download it to my PC
7. Remove the SD Card and place in a safe place... Just in Case I need to go back
8. Install the Pi-4 (8gb) into the Argon Case
9. Connect a monitor to the HDMI port so I can watch the install progress. (not necessary, but still helpful).
10. Boot the Pi
11. Wait for HA setup and update itself - took about 20 minutes
12. Create a logon using the UI
13. Upload the snapshot created earlier and restore it.
14. Wait another 10-15 minutes.

HA came up with all my addons and devices working perfectly. Less than an hour of downtime and now my setup is much more reliable. It also seems to run a LOT faster from the SSD than it did from the SD Card.

Lessons learned:

1. Keep a spare Ethernet cable around - even if everything is wireless. It can make setting up certain devices easier.
2. SATA SSD drives (required by the Argon SSD Case) are getting harder to find. Everyone seems to want to sell PCIe and NVME devices, which won't work in this case.
3. 480gb was probably overkill for HA. The 120gb or 240gb drives would have been plenty and would have cost a lot less. Drive usage shows that HA is using less than 1% of my drive.
   

Things I still need to do:

1. Get the Argon CPU Fan working. Apparently this requires getting I2C working first and that seems to be more difficult than the documentation says. Fortunately my CPU is running quite cool without it, as the Argon's passive cooling is doing the job.