I want to leave HAOS live and also run docker for an arr stack sparately.
I got a good deal on a pi5 16gb. I wont get another and NUCs are expensive. I want to put an arr stack, deluge and Jellyfin for local single device viewing. I don’t see HA using more than 6gb of RAM, or close to it, so tere should be room to manage this.
I have a 256gb sd, I will change eventually to ssd, so I think I have the resources.
I just need the know how, could anyone advise on some walkthroughs that could allow me to not knock HA while I build out the other side.
If you want to keep HAOS as the OS (and the nice update/backup experience), there’s a middle option nobody’s mentioned yet: run the extra apps as add-ons instead of a separate Docker setup. There are community add-on repositories (alexbelgium’s is the big one) that package Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, qBittorrent/Deluge and Jellyfin as HA add-ons, so they live inside the Supervisor’s containers and get included in HA backups if you want.
A few caveats for your plan:
- Do the SSD move first. Torrenting plus a media library on a 256 GB SD card will wear it out and make HA itself slow, and HAOS on a Pi 5 boots fine from NVMe or USB SSD.
- The Pi 5 dropped the hardware H.264 encoder the Pi 4 had, so Jellyfin transcoding is pure CPU. As iBlessi said, it’s fine for direct play to one device; avoid anything that forces a transcode.
- Keep media on a separate drive or share mounted through HA’s Storage settings, so a full HA backup doesn’t try to include your library.
HAOS doesn’t really share. It’s a full Linux distribution designed to be the entire OS on whatever it’s installed on, and it runs its own internal containers through the Supervisor. The Supervised install, the old middle route, is no longer supported (its end of support was release 2025.12).
So on one Pi 5 you pick. Keep HAOS and live with what runs as an app there, which is what add-ons are called now. Or put a regular Linux install with Docker on it and run the official Home Assistant Container image next to the arr stack, Deluge and Jellyfin. That’s the whole trade. Container has no Supervisor, no apps and no one-click updates, so anything you run as an add-on today becomes its own container, and Thread and Z-Wave, which run as apps, get no out-of-the-box support. Either way, take the full backup first, as uten151 says, and I’d do the SSD move soon: Home Assistant’s own database writes can wear out an SD card.
As I wrote my question this came into my mind, I was hoping I just didnt understand the options properly. Damn. I like the update experience it is very nice, the arr stack ws to be my first experience of docker and self hosting so it was a trial.
I may have to grab another pi and do it separate so. Do you think an 8gb pi4 is sufficient?
Probably, for what you described, with one condition: no transcoding. If Jellyfin can direct play your files to that one device, the server just hands the file through, and the device’s codec support is the limit, not the Pi. If files need transcoding, a Pi 4 is the wrong box for it; an Intel N100 with Quick Sync is the step up I’d look at. So check what your TV or player can play before you buy the second Pi.
To add on, the supervisor install was a terrible experience, I did it for years. Constant issues updating, very broken experience.
My advice: buy the SSD now and download the latest HA image for Pi5 and save it to the SSD. Save a full backup of your current HA into an accessible network share or to a large enough capacity USB Drive. Shut down your current HA. Power up the Pi5 with the SSD, configure the fresh instance of HA on the PI5 (name, IP Address, etc. to match your HA instance). Restore the backup.
