The Best SD Card for Home Assistant (Raspberry Pi)
The SD Card of your Raspberry Pi plays a key role in running your Home Automation hub, and also can be the weak point – bringing your sensors and automations to a standstill should it fail. You can of course swap out your SD card for a more reliable and well-performing SDD; something that we’ll explore more another day.
Getting Started
The challenge is that SD cards were not designed for continuous writes and rewrites, at least not to the extent that a System/Database like Home Assistant requires. Remember, every state change will be committed to the database, and this requires a write action to the SD Card.
All SD Cards are not the same, and differ in their Class and also what type of flash memory they use. Jason Gin has written an interesting tear-down article on the SanDisk High Endurance cards (link here). There are also different classes, with a multitude of different numbers and letters, which is confusing. Go for the A (Application Performance) class – which is optimized for application I/O, as you would see with Home Assistant. A1 is good, and A2 is even better.
Important: Don’t forget to back-up your Home Assistant instance, and I strongly recommend using a cloud backup method like the Google Drive Cloud Backup Add-On.
Here are the Top 3 SD cards that I recommend:
- SanDisk Extreme 64 GB microSDXC Memory Card with A2 App Performance, Class 10, UHS-I, U3, V30 (link here)
- Samsung PRO Endurance 32 GB microSDHC UHS-I U3 100 MB/s Video Monitoring Memory Card with Adapter (link here)
- SanDisk MAX ENDURANCE 32 GB microSDHC Memory Card + SD Adaptor 15,000 Hours Endurance (link here)
