I am a fan of the Argon One M.2 case raspberry Pi case. I finally got my hands on one for the Raspberry Pi which runs my Home Assistant. The transfer wasn’t entirely straight forward. The notes below might help the next person doing this.

Create a backup

The first step is to create a backup of your Home Assistant. You will need this later after the new install.

Enable USB boot

The SSD in the Argon One case is connected via USB. Since recently, the Raspberry Pi can boot off of USB devices. You might have to update the eeprom of your Pi to make this work. Mine already had the newest version. You will have to change the settings of the Pi to boot from USB. I used a MicroSD card with Raspberry Pi OS on it for this. The tool raspi-config can do this.

Install Home Assistant

I used a USB A - USB A cable to connect the SSD portion of the case to my PC. The Raspberry Pi images can be used to install Home Assistant as if it was a MicroSD card. So far so easy.

Restore the backup

When booting this new Home Assistant installation for the first time from the SSD, do not create a username and password. Instead, use the link at the bottom to upload the backup created in step one. I had no feedback whether this worked or not. But when I opened the Home Assistant UI after a few minutes, everything was like it was at the time of the backup.

Quiet the fan

The Argon One case has a fan. That is great, but noisy. On Raspbian OS, you can just install the software for the case to regulate it. On Home Assistant, I found this more challenging. Here is what worked for me:

  1. Install the HassOS I2C Configurator. I gave it root rights by disabling “protection mode”. I marked it to start at boot.
  2. Reboot the Pi.
  3. Reboot the Pi. (Yes, twice. The logs of the add-on said so)
  4. Install the Fan hat add-on. I configured it to start at boot.
  5. Reboot the Pi.
  6. Reboot the Pi. (This time, I did it just for good measure.)