Argon EON is a 4-bay network access storage (NAS) enclosure designed to work with Raspberry Pi 4 that follows other popular Raspberry Pi cases from the company including the Argon One and Argon One M.2.
Also known as the Argon EON Pi NAS, the enclosure features four SATA hard drive ports that will fit two 3.5-inch SATA HDD and two 2.5-inch SATA for a maximum capacity of up to 40 TB with consumer-grade drives, although I suppose it’s not a hard limit.
Argon EON Pi NAS specifications:
- Supported SBC – Raspberry Pi 4 SBC with Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 processor, up to 8GB RAM
- Storage
- 4x SATA drive bays with up to 2x 3.5-inch HDD, and up to 2x 2.5-inch SSD/HDD with up to 10TB capacity per drive
- MicroSD card socket (for OS)
- Video and audio outputs – 2x full-size HDMI 2.0 ports up to 4Kp60, AV jack with composite video and stereo audio
- Display – OLED information display with temperature, CPU usage, memory usage, etc…
- Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet port, dual-band 802.11b/g/n/ac WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 LE
- USB – 2x USB 3.0 ports, 2x USB 2.0 ports
- Expansion – Externally accessible 40-pin Raspberry Pi header
- Misc – RTC plus battery backup for scheduled on/off, safe shutdown power button, PWM system fan, 50 x 50mm brushless motor
- Power Supply – 12V/5A power supply with 100V to 240V AC input
Just like other Argon cases, the Argon EON will bring all ports on the rear panel for neater cable management, but you’d lose one USB port since it’s probably used for the quad SATA board. That also means the data path from the Broadcom BCM2711 to the drives will go from PCIe to USB 3.0 to SATA. We’ll have to see how it affects performance, as Argon40 (that’s the company name) did not provide numbers. It may not matter that much for mechanical hard drives, but it may have an impact if you intend to use SSDs.
The enclosure is made of “space-grade” aluminum and designed with pillars in contact with the CPU and memory (I assume through a thermal pad), plus a built-in controllable fan to keep the Raspberry Pi 4 and hard drives cool under all conditions.
You could install pretty much any OS supported by the Raspberry Pi, but the company specifically lists the official Raspberry Pi OS, OpenMediaVault (OMV), Twister OS, and Ubuntu for Raspberry Pi. There aren’t any good photos of the NAS, so the best is to watch the video to better understand how it’s designed internally.
An adapter board is connected directly to the HDMI side of the Raspberry Pi 4, so that means alternatives like Rock Pi 4 or ODROID-C4 will not work with the enclosure, or at least not without some serious work.
Argon EON NAS Pi has just launched on Kickstarter with a rather low $3600 US funding target that has been surpassed within minutes. Now that the $93 rewards are all gone, you’d need to pledge around $127 for the enclosure plus the 60W power supply, or $198 for a full system equipped with a Raspberry pi 4 with 4GB RAM. You’ll need to add $26 for shipping, and deliveries are scheduled to start in December 2021, but remember that delays are frequent in crowdfunding campaigns, so don’t necessarily expect to receive it before Christmas.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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