“Bought this case to upgrade my home server. After adding 2x 18TB and 2x5TB i now have enough storage. The case was prebuilt and easy to install all the hardware required. It's well built and very sturdy and would recoomed to anyone looking for a new NAS / Home server”
“It is a monster of a case! Generally well made and constructed. I would say there are some opportunities to improve for version 2.0, but, if you want somewhere smart and sleek to house a Pi NAS, this is it.”
“So far really loving the enclosure. There was a slight hardware fault with the daughter board (one of the hdmi ports has stuttering audio), however I have been in contact with Argon and they're sending a free replacement.
Aside from that the build quality is great and the added space is fantastic! Heat management has been really nice, though adding HDDs definitely requires that fan, and in warm conditions I'm having to accept about 47deg average HDD temperatures. That's mostly so I don't hear the fan - it's not terrible, but it's definitely audible in a quiet room.”
“Overall pretty happy with this enclosure. It replaces a loose pi with externall HDD attached so it's a huge step up.
It looks nice but the design choices on the shape limit it to only 2 3.5 inch and 2 2.5 inch ones (Or 4 2.5 inch ones but I can't find large capacity 2.5s rated for Nas use) drives which is a shame.
A lot of the enclosure is made of connected metal and acts pretty well as a heat sync. There are thermal pads and metal blocks that connect the 2 main hotspots from the pi to the case. The entire case warms up and radiates heat surprisingly well which minimises need to the fan to run.
As far as the fan goes it's incredibly loud for its small size and doesn't really seem to make a lot of difference. At 10% is almost as loud as at 100%. Might as well just set it to be max speed when it's on and not fuss with ramp up rates at different temps. If you put this in your bedroom you will regret your choices in the middle of the night. Ask me how I know.
I wish the shape was more square so it could fit 4 3.5 inch drives. It would also allow bigger fan of 80mm ir something. Could also be 10mm taller to allow a depth one.
The screen + button combo is a nice touch. It's a little awkward to know if the button is pressed or not. It's sensitive in some places but tactile feedback on it seems inconsistent.
Generally I'd recommend this as a solid upgrade to anyone wanting to move from a loose pi - but not to anyone looking to migrate from a dedicated NAS.”
“Excellent bit of kit, looks great, well built and easy to set up using the included quick start guide. You even get a screwdriver included to help with the installation of your Raspberry PI and SSD/HDD's. The only issue I had was downloading the OMV software from GIT hub due to an expired SSL certificate but that didn't have anything to do with the hardware and an addition to the download link in the instruction to skip the certificate check sorted the issue. As usual great service and fast delivery from the good folks at The PiHut. A very satisfied customer.”
“Assembling the unit with an actual Raspi 4 is reasonably straightforward (except for the disk drives - see below) and the instructions provided are sufficiently detailed.
On first use, I could not get the enclosure to power up and this was because the power switch was very temperamental. The Argon support forum mentioned faulty power supplies, but mine was OK - it was just the power switch that was dodgy. It solved itself after many experimental hard presses over a couple of hours!
While the product specification says you can fit 4 SATA 2.5" HDDs, actually doing so requires a modification to the drive enclosure since the holes for the drive securing screws are incorrectly placed. The solution I used was to slightly enlarge the holes for the left-most drive (as seen from the rear). That being said the 2 left-most drives are tight up against each other and I can't help thinking that is a poor design decision as airflow between those two drives is non-existent.
The unit's fan is very loud and the default settings mean the fan is on full speed almost all the time. The Argon utilities script allows customization of the fan settings but as evidenced by the amount of discussion in the Argon support forum, it is not entirely certain if the utility can do the job or manually editing a configuration file (or a combination of those) is required.
The unit's real time clock keeps setting itself to some date in the year 2068. The Argon support forum discusses this and many users suggest solutions but I've not found any that work reliably. Until, that is, I installed OpenMediaVault (OMV) NAS software which brings along its own use of a public NTP server.
OMV won't allow you to create a RAID array through its own workbench (since the Raspi connects to the disks via USB) so you need to do that by logging into the Raspi via term and following the instructions linked to on the Argon forum. I've successfully created RAID 0, 1 and 10 arrays this way. The OMV offers a plugin utility that lets you create a JBOD - and that works fine too. On the whole, OMV works well on the Argon EON.
After testing this unit for a couple of weeks I've had data on my disks (whether RAID or JBOD) just disappear for no apparent reason leaving the disks in an uninitialised state. I bought this unit to compare it to my QNAP and Synology NAS's and so maybe the trouble I've had with disappearing data is down to inexperience. That being said it's not something that's ever happened to me with the commercial NAS's that I'm used to.
If you are reasonably technical and you like rolling up your sleeves I think you might have fun with this unit. Personally, I'll be keeping hold of my QNAP and Synology units.”
“This case is absolutely astonishing. The quality of the materials is excellent: just by opening the box you can easily realise that this is a premium product. Also, something that you can't appreciate in the product pictures is that the on/off button is also an OLED display! What a time to be alive! And its design is so beautiful that, rather than hiding the Raspberry Pi somewhere behind a monitor or inside a cabinet, what I want is to put it to display.
Argon has, once again, raised the standards of quality for Raspberry Pi cases. An absolute masterpiece.”
