Argon EON Pi NAS Case (Network Attached Storage) for Raspberry Pi 4

Product Information

Switching to a Pi-based system means I can use mainline Ubuntu instead of clownshoes Armbian - and that's worth its weight in gold. There are issues, however, that are hard to overlook and anyone getting Argon Eon should be aware of these.

The press release seems to suggest more RAM variants may become available in the future - imagine having 16gb RAM alongside the PCIe and processor upgrade! Seems to be quite a bit faster but some things changed like the USB ports being switched, which makes it impossible to use it with the EON because it would mean using the HDDs with a USB2. Instructions a bit vague, skipping a step: you *really* need to remove the rear IO shield before you try to shove the Raspberry Pi in.

Despite the NAS-oriented features, Argon Ean doesn’t forget about the fact that a Raspberry Pi board sleeps inside. You can use the other USB3 port to plug another external (preferably with independent power-supply) HDD Box and use it to backup the internal ones. I used to be a big fan of Synology, until I learned what kind of clothes the emperor was (not) wearing. This has worked well, but I would like to clean up my network a bit (less devices, more organized, less maintenance, less complexity).

But with space for up to four SSDs, USB booting, excellent cooling and support for the Raspberry Pi 4 we have an excellent, if expensive case. Do yourself a favour and get the RTC battery (CR1220) as soon as you can as running Argon Eon without it, will cause a lot of NTP-related issues. That, combined with Synology's quirky operating system, limited UI functionality, and downright exacerbating technical support steered me to QNAP, where I've not had any regrets since. I know in the whole NAS networking industry 40TB isn’t much, but as far as Raspberry Pi storage is concerned that’s more than enough to keep your data safe. Tom's Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher.It seems to run quieter… but that may just be wishful thinking… Running a non-standard fan that already has bearings fail.

There is a significant heft to the enclosure and feels just like something that should hold a chunk of your digitised life. Looking like a piece of near future technology, the gun metal grey aluminum case is a prism of hyper truncated triangles, or in layman's terms “a six sided prism with a slight triangular look. If you want your home server not only capable of huge storage and Raspberry Pi performance, but also as something great to look at, this is for you. My EON is running as a NAS drive as well as a plex media server in it’s current setup and I have plans to test if it can expand to host a couple of security cameras as well. I've taken it out and flipped it around, so it's extracting hot air from the top of the case instead of just redistributing it.However we'll be updating all the Argon Cases for the Raspberry Pi 5 to maximize all the new features of the RPi5. This is a NAS, plain and simple but unlike other NAS units, the Argon EON exudes an aesthetic that would be at home in The Expanse. Effectively the same drives, though the Helios64 ones are newer and what was a WD Red is now a WD Red Plus, in the same room, at the same 20-degree ambient temperature: 9-11 degrees cooler across the board. Space grade aluminum, cyberpunk looks and plenty of storage options make the Argon EON the ideal choice for Raspberry Pi 4-powered NAS solutions. If the fan speed is set to above 1 and the fan has *not* been triggered, it seems to work fine; if it *has* been triggered the bottom few lines are entirely missing.