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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/dnsfr on 2024-10-06 15:08:29+00:00.

I used to have a Raspberry Pi 3 with 1GB of RAM as a server, but the RAM started becoming a bottleneck. On top of that, microSD cards kept failing, and it was very slow to boot up.

Like many others, I started considering an N100 as a server, but long story short, it would be too expensive to import one to my country.

So, I ended up with one of those cheap Android TV boxes from Aliexpress. I flashed Debian on it (see debian-on-amlogic), then ran the supervised installer (with a few tweaks).

To be specific, it’s an H96 Max S905W2 with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of flash storage.

That was almost a year ago, and I’ve never had any issues. It runs a bunch of different containers (for MQTT, Zigbee, file browsing, RSS, DDNS, etc.).

I would, of course, choose an N100 over it if the prices were reasonable, but I thought it might be interesting to share this here in case someone is on a tight budget.