HI all, I joined to get involved with the 5070 thread here, I currently run home assistant but have like many others have, been plagued with sd fails, so we are looking to migrate to an alternative, after much study these wyse machines seem to be the best bang for buck, out pricing the Lenovo m600 and nuc. I found out about this machine today (i brought mine from
ebay UK) and it seems there is not much known about these machines as a viable step up from pi. Would like to ask you all if you could share any information about the 5070 that i can report back to the home assistant group it would be great, all the best
What's "Home Assistant"? Some Linux distribution designed for home automation purposes? You want us to do the research to tell you what you'll need to run it?
Seriously if it's used by us home-lab guys it'll probably run on a self-contained VM (probably imported VDI) in our hypervisor environments instead of actual dedicated hardware, unless you need to interface with sensors.
Then either do USB passthrough on the hypervisor or get a real machine. The same line of reasoning regarding the use of thin clients also works for Wyse 5060 or HP t520/t530/t620/t630 thin client (with older AMD APUs) - stateside it's about 30-60 USD for one. If all you need is 2GB RAM, 8/16/32GB eMMC (both soldered and not upgradeable) and x86/x64, you can go lower and probably use a Wyse 3040 (Cherry Trail Atom), the HP t420 (gimped Jaguar) or t430 thin client (Gemini Lake Atom, 6w TDP versus 10w on the Wyse 5070). Those things are stupid cheap (40 dollars accepted including shipping on eBay best offers for US buyers). They are probably more than enough for the task at hand, unless the software have heavy lifting plugins running locally like AI inferencing based on camera screen captures or something ridiculous like that - in which case - use a real server or a Jetson with inferencing hardware.
If it's longevity you want, buy appropriate media for the device in question - I only use Sandisk/Samsung Class U3/A2/V20 SDXC drives in my devices (Rpi2/3/4s and a few dashcams/security cams), and those machines generate signals data for SDR playback, write ADS-B data to archives and do weekly-overwritten HD camera footage, and I haven't had issues with media failures for the past 12-18 months. However, I did have to tell people to pull "Microcenter checkout specials" (those are the cheap class 4/6/10 generic cards sold at the checkout line at the local (US) MicroCenter computer stores for a small amount of money) out of their dashcams and RPis. Those are slow and tend to have low service life. I get the usual noise from cheapskates about blowing 20 dollars to run a 35 dollar device...until I point out the equal absurdity of expecting a 35 dollar device with a 5 dollar SD card to reliably capture and store video footage on a security camera keeping tabs on a million dollar home, or monitoring the road for a Bimmer worth 80,000 USD.
Of course, the question is also whether the OS in question (HassOS) implements copy-on-write via memory based filesystems for the OS and keeping writes to a minimum like HP ThinPro or Wyse TermOS...I ran it on a VM and don't see it happening. There's also quite a bit that I don't like about HassOS (starting with their gimped userland, the odd greeting screen in Chinese (whaaaa...?) and the kernel, which is in that Linux kernel 5 danger zone for Gemini lake machines), but that's a different subject altogether.
What exactly are you planning to do on it? The Wyse 5070s are efficient little quadcore Atoms, and this is the case even for the base model J4105 model. Those are Goldmont atom cores - individually they might be a bit weak, but collectively they are quite decent, at least performant against the AMD embedded cores (except the Ryzen embedded stuff). Power usage on the 5070 is around 4w idle, 12-13w maxed out (4k VP9 playback on Google Chrome in Windows 10). The 5070 has 2 DDR4 SODIMM slots (the same as the ones found in most post-Haswell laptops) and will support up to 16GB of RAM in Windows 10, and 32GB in Linux. Then of course, what's the benefit of running x86 instead of ARM for something like this? I have no idea. What don't they have compared to the Pi? GPIO pins and hats that use them (which is a big thing for the RPi folks). If you need them, the Dell won't support it (and neither would their fellow thin client cousins, the NUCs, TinyMiniMicro boxes and etc) Of course, the 5070 does have, what, 6 USB 3.0 Type A ports? If your ZigBee/X10/IRDA dongle are USB, it'll be do just fine.
The 5070 has a SATA M2 slot but you'll need at least 2280 - the 2242 drives don't fit. I don't consider storage speed to be that much of an issue. Frankly, I kept my eMMC untouched and went directly to the M2. If th M2 wears out I can toss it. If the eMMC wears out, I'll have to toss the machine (even though eMMC is surprisingly resilient. My Lenovo tablet from 2013 is still doing just fine with its 32GB chip...although it's always been rather slow)
If cheap and cheerful is all you need just for a home automation gateway, yeah, it'll be just fine. Of course, just spin up a VM for the task instead.