Mid last week, I wrote about the latest updates in my quest for an ideal Home Assistant (HAOS) setup -and I’d reached the point of using my Synology NAS (DS720+) for HAOS – this is the sequel featuring the Turewell HSI-N95 mini-PC.
Firstly, no doubt about it the Synology is in many ways better than using a Raspberry Pi – we’ll ignore the fact that the NAS also obscenely expensive and today in 2025 a tad slow when using traditional hard disks. As a media server, the DS720+ is just fine, it’s been serving up movies for years now.
I was lucky enough to be given a DS720+ by Synology and at the time (2021 I believe) I was super impressed having previously been using a DS214 – very old – but reliable to this day. The DS720+ runs Home Assistant in Synology’s VMM (virtual machine manager) just fine, though I did have to upgrade the RAM to ensure I had enough for Home Assistant while leaving enough for general use as a media server etc. Right now my HA (HAOS) is running on it – see the original article for full details.
I’ve had the DS720+ for several years now and as I review the specs and having checked out it’s use for Home Assistant, it WORKS reliably but leaves some open questions like old processor – limited maximum RAM (8GB according to Synology) and I simply could not store backups on externally attached SSD reliably or figure out how to reliably mount the SSD as a volume to run HAOS more quickly.
So, with the comfort of a working HAOS setup, I was a happy boy until I noticed my HAOS startup/ reboot times were not actually much better than my old Raspberry Pi 5 and of course there’s some hard disk thrashing going on at peak times. I could of course replace the hard drives with modern SSDs but I have 4TB + 4TB in RAID mode – not cheap to upgrade.
I’ve taken the plunge of buying a bargain mini-PC which arrived yesterday. The unit I’ve selected comes from Amazon.es and it is looking good already.. I’ve gone for the 8GB model (256GB storage) at little over 100 Euros (Amazon discount coupon which appeared for no obvious reason). There’s a 16GB version for a little more – but be wary – Turewell site is all about domestic appliances – nothing about the PC and nothing in Google search. Luckily I found BIOS info in a Google search (APTIO BIOS). I also noted on the box that the PC was manufactured by Shenzhen Hugsun Technology Co., Ltd. I’ve dropped them an email.
On advice from my tech friend Antonio, I created a Proxmox setup on a USB stick for Home Assistant (haos) – ready to install. Why Proxmox? Free and will allows me to run HAOS on the miniPC while allowing for easy snapshots, faster HAOS operation than RPi or Zimaboard or NAS (confirmed) and potential for multi-uses (additional virtual machines) should the PC prove fast enough. The NAS by virtue of RAM limits and older processor is definitely out of that discussion.
In order – I went to the Proxmox site and grabbed an image suitable for an x86 PC – yes of course this will mean losing the pre-installed Windows but that can always be backed up.
And exactly what did I do? I went here to the official Proxmox site (downloads) and clicked on the first link. Don’t confuse me for someone who understands this – I’m just going step by step.. I have a handy 16GB USB stick of which a small amount is needed… I put the stick in my existing PC and started the above download – which produced something that didn’t work properly – when done I flashed the USB dongle with Rufus in image (dd) mode (I wasn’t given the choice – I just grabbed the file, selected the USB destination and that was it – minutes later I had my Proxmox image on the USB stick).
In the bios, secure boot off, virtualisation on, power on after reboot (info from a web search for that bios, not the machine).
From here – it gets tricky for a Proxmox beginner like me – so I’m going to note Antonio’s instructions for others as the original link didn’t work properly (ANTONIO – TAKE NOTE – need your install info 🙂 ) – meanwhile after some messing around we now have Proxmox on the new PC running HAOS – using 6GB RAM of the installed 8GB RAM… and an 80GB virtual HD and it’s working a TREAT (overhead from native around 1-2%) – WAY faster than all previous attempts… So, RPi5 4GB is 70 euros – PSU 13 euros – 64GB M.2 SSD Amazon 54 Euros and supporting case – all in maybe 150 Euros whereas my new mini-PC is on Amazon.es (complete with mounting bracket to sit on the back of a monitor) for 109 Euros – no brainer. Still some work to do – snapshots need a tweak, Google Drive backup needs a tweek. But – HAOS is up and running. My entire Home Assistant rig (2 homes) is running just fine.
Update: I had horrendous issues with Proxmix and in the end it worked but said I could not create snapshots – kind of defeating the point of installing Proxmox – so – I’ve just gone native (as it were) and put HAOS directly onto the mini-PC. Good move. Also added a USB disk (SSD) I had handy.
Meanwhile – although I already found it on the web, info from Turewell on the N95 arrived today..
bios (access by repeatedly hitting DEL on boot):
chipset – pch-IO configuration – select [State after G3] – [SO State] is ON after powerup.
Advanced – Network Stack Configuration – select [Enabled] to turn on network startup function if that is wanted. I didn’t.