Argon EON PI NAS - Unboxing, Building, Setup - Almost my favorite Raspberry Pi accessory

finally after months of waiting what has the potential to be my favorite raspberry pi accessory it's finally here i've meant to go even a couple of days without opening this and setting it up is beyond me but that's we're gonna do today take a look at the argon eon raspberry pi 4 nas case [Music] so this is it this is the argon eon uh raspberry pi 4 mass case and i did open it just to take a peek at what's in it but i haven't opened it and set it up or done anything with it so this is going to be essentially a live review of what it is um it is the same people who make my favorite regular raspberry pi case the argon one and um i kickstarted or i backed this off of kickstarter on september 14th of 2021 and this arrived on my doorstep february 1st 2022 so over four months of waiting i'm finally happy to get it in my hands but i did pay 150 for this i don't know when they plan on selling this retail if you're watching this later and it already is up for retail neat but as of right now i don't think they are selling it just yet so yeah like i said this is a pi 4 byo nas is how they list it basically saying you bring your own operating system and hard drives they supply the case to have everything set up and configured okay a couple boxes so this is it it is made out of aluminum it feels really really nice just like the argon one i expected nothing less it has two side these definitely aren't glass but they look nice and uh power button uh around the back you have all of your inputs you get dual hdmi uh usb 3.0 usb 2.0 you do have access to the gpio pins and one of the major benefits of this is that you only need one power adapter which is included i hope i assume that's what this is yes so yeah about this you can store four hard drives in it the weird thing about it though is that two of them can be 3.5 inch while the other two can only be 2.5 inch or you could go with four 2.5 inch drives we will be going with the two 3.5 and two 2.5 setup today we have uh two silicon power one terabyte drives and then we have uh two sea gates what are these six terabyte exos uh seven e8s so these are their enterprise line i believe but yeah that's the setup we're going to go with so let's open this up take a look at how we go about setting this up probably need some screwdrivers okay oh by the way i'm using a raspberry pi 4 model b i believe this is a 4 gigabyte version um yes i know it is frustrating right now for a lot of people because the raspberry pi itself is extremely hard to find i know it's frustrating i waited for about three or so months to uh snag this one so i know you're paying trust me so these front pieces are magnetic this one kind of just fell off yeah this is definitely not tempered glass it feels like plastic with some type of like kind of black shiny coating on it so this feels pretty cheap but i don't think this is really meant to be set on display but i mean it looks nice enough too if you really want to show off how nerdy you really are so yeah that should just oh there we go come off so now we have full exposure to the inner workings and here you can see the four uh sata ports and you can see these two or these two can probably fit the 3.5 inch while these two are much closer together why they didn't just make this a normal shape and to let you fit three or four 3.5 inch drives is beyond me but um design over functionality i guess i don't know what is in here feels like a screwdriver neat uh the usb ports to get everything that's connected this connected to get everything connected i can't get this out feels like a bag we have evolved to use tools uh yes screws and looks like some rubber pads some sticky tape let's go ahead and take this out looks like there's four screws three screws alright one two okay three all right now this should just come out i said this oh it's connected okay so this is the sata board as you can see there are four sata ports that supply state of power and sata data but i'm not a wrapper there are more screws okay it looks like there's one we gotta remove the risers is this oh check it out wait but that doesn't help oh wait wait really it's like a it's like a hex bit that i'm pretty sure you use oh wow neat so you can remove your little hex risers that uh that you see in all your computer cases and motherboard connectors you get a little hex screw well worth the 150 dollars i paid for this we did it now we just plug in the sister board which breaks out our audio looks like hdmi uh what else so we have audio hdmi and that looks like pretty much it so yeah that just goes in okay all right step one okay so the idea of this is to use open mediavault as your nas operating system you can use whatever you want obviously but i've personally used open media vaults on a raspberry pi before and it works really well so wait what oh that is wild so i already have the ssd loaded onto here but there's actually an extension ribbon right here so this goes into the back of the raspberry pi 4 and then it connects to an output over here which is pretty neat oh another problem so i have these heat sinks installed and it does not like that so i have to take these off because they do have built-in metal pieces that act as a heat sink for your cpu and vrm oh that's not good it's like my dad used to always say if you don't have to do it more than once then you honestly probably did it right the first time and you're really smart fortunately we did not do it right the first time okay now now we're good i love this little hex screw thingy i can't wait to say how much i'm gonna use it and then never use it ever again so this goes back on top connects in right here there's some little pins make sure to line those up okay we're good we're good we're good we're good we're good we're good we're good okay let's uh let's put the sd card in cool uh let's put the back plate back on that's looking good okay and this connects here so that all of our hard drives can be recognized by our raspberry pi and now we can put the hard drives in so i think the play is uh one right here one that's not right all right so i guess the 3.5 inch ones go in the middle uh this one probably goes next to it we gotta mount oh they mount here that's what those holes are for okay so these holes on the back are to keep your freaking hard drives up i was wondering how they were mounted so i like this mounting mechanism this is pretty cool all right our hard drives are nice and secured in the case now so we will complement that with two silicon power one terabyte ssds so now we need the black screws so you could potentially go with four ssds and do some type of raid uh raid 5 setup if you want to go that route so i did forget to mention there is a jumper down here to where you can set this to be always on or normal default so using the power switch always on is going to be if there is power to this make sure it's on so if you do want this to be tucked away in a closet somewhere where you know if the power trips or something you want this to automatically come back on uh just setting that jumper pin will make it do that but everything is now connected uh i probably should have put these thermal pads on snap these back on like so boom ooh good thing they sent me the uh american version that would have sucked okay oh it's on no wait i don't have network connected wait okay we should have some type of post all right so it's powered on we have raspberry pi os 64-bit up and running and the first thing it wants us to do is install the argon scripts which lets us control the fan as well as the power button so let's go ahead and do that uh curl https gone eon sh uh bash okay so now you can use argon config and this will let you change things like uh the fan the ir controller uh real time clock another thing i didn't mention is that this does have a real-time clock in it so it can handle waking from sleep and automatic tasks based on what time of the day it is you can configure the oled which is built into this power button and you can see here uh we'll get a better shot of it later but the power button is also an oled panel which can display stats and other stuff the next step is to get everything updated so we're going to go ahead and do that now and then once this is done we are going to download open media vault and luckily it's a one line download and installation thanks to the fine folks over at uh open media vault no such file or directory what did i miss okay i'm dumb uh i just literally wasn't entering it exactly how it says there's a space between the hyphen and the actual url which isn't too clear by these instructions but now you know so this is going to run through install open media vault and once that's done we should be able to access open media vault via the ip address of the raspberry pi all right it's done installing open media vault it took about 15 or so minutes so saying the ip address is 10.0.0.30 so if we go to that we should be an open media vault which we are i have logged in the default is admin for the user and open media vault for the password once you go in you'll see a pretty traditional open media vault setup if you're not familiar with open media vault i do have a couple of videos on it check my channel out i will link one of them up here if you're interested but yeah this is open media vault it is a nas operating system that runs on the raspberry pi it also runs on x86 based systems so you don't have to use it just on a pi but it natively will run on the pi which is pretty cool i mentioned before that you can set up raid but there is one issue if we go into disks first i'll show you that yes it is seeing all of our drives here but if we go into raid management you will see if we try to create something right here it tells us devices connected via usb will not be listed too unreliable so yes we don't have any devices because all these are technically connected over usb so you cannot create a raid configuration in the open media vault gui you can though create your own using mda mda dm it's like a tongue twister every time for me but you can go and do that i will link the guide i use down below if you want to set up your own personal raid i've done it before it has worked for me so you know don't do as i do or don't what is it saying do as i say not as i do so if you want to do raid on this go ahead i will link the god i use down below but what we've done is we've gone ahead and created a file system on one of our solid state drives it's really easy just go into here create select the device you want to use select a file system type we just used ext4 click save it'll run through create the file system then all you have to do is mount it and now it is mounted we can use it and what i'm going to do now is set up a samba share so that we can actually access this over the network which is the entire point of an ass is to access your storage over your network so let's go ahead and do that first we're gonna go in here to users we are going to create one we will call it uh samba creative i know blah blah blah okay click save click apply yes all right i don't know if this thing is making noise the fan is spun up so it is audible to me i don't know if it's being picked up by the mic but just in case i'm going to move this to the ground yeah there you go so now we'll go into services down to smb sifs settings and we're going to enable it click save then back to smbs go to shares create and it's going to ask for a folder and we don't have one yet so we're going to create one we'll give it a name we'll call this pi uh pi share and it's gonna ask for a file system we created one before here it is a relative path you can specify if you want a specific path on the file system here by default it will just name it based on the name you provided before click save apply yes so while this is running let's take a look at how much power is being used we are sitting at about 22 watts right now so that's honestly pretty good for two 3.5 inch drives and two sata drives but obviously they're not under much load so we'll check that again once we do a speed test so we're gonna do is we're gonna click over here we're gonna go to privileges and you can see samba has um it's really not intuitive but we're going to give uh read and write permissions click save all right now click apply you will get used to this if you're using openmediavault and now technically we should be able to access it so if we go into our file system 100.00.30 slash chair all right and we're just going to use the user we created which was samba unspecified error all right i forgot a step so you do have to go back into samba go over to shares and actually create that share which i don't like this i believe on the older version of open media vault you didn't have to do this step i could be wrong though but you have to create it select the shared folder that you created no it's not public yes it's browsable you have a bunch of options here that you can check or leave off depending on your use case we will just leave it all default click save again wait for it wait for it there it is apply yes okay now we are in yay and now we can test to see what kind of speeds we get across the network so what we're going to do is let's connect to let's connect to my 10 gig other nas so my main production nas server we'll go ahead and connect to that okay let's go into one of my projects that i'm working on i actually offloaded some of the footage just now so let's move it back over we have a let's see these are some big files so we have a 28 gigabyte file right here let's throw that over and see what kind of speeds we get now this is probably going to be best case scenario because it's just one large file so let's see what we get now this is on a one gigabit connection meaning that the max theoretical speed on this is somewhere around 120 130 megabytes per second and we are getting uh one right now um i know it jumps up and down uh depending on your configuration and the files you are moving but okay so you can see we are having some kind of issue uh these are not the speeds you would expect to see on a one gigabyte connection one gigabit connection um across the land on especially on an ssd uh we should not be bottlenecked at all by either the usb 3.0 connection or the ssd itself so something weird is going on i think i might know what um hold on one second okay so i think i have an idea of what might have caused the issue uh those one terabyte drives from silicon power have a small slc cache on them which i think is getting filled up really quickly and then throttling the performance of the drive itself so i've created another uh share on the hard disk so we're going to test that now just to see if it was the drive that was causing the issue or the drive that was causing the issue and i think it was so let's go ahead and test that out let's go back here so this time it's called uh pi share hdd and now let's try moving the file over so this is on a hard drive which again uh max speeds of a hard drive are probably around 120 megabytes per second and we started off at around that it dipped a little bit which is normal but now it's back up it's gonna dip a little bit uh probably go back up and this looks way more normal and way more usable than the solid state drive so learn from my mistake make sure you use quality ssds so the ones i used were the silicon power one terabyte pretty sure the only ones they have they don't have any different tier levels so um stay away from those if you are using them for a nas system for sure but yeah performance looks great on the system itself assuming you're using the correct drives yeah that is it i'm not going to go deep into open media vault i have other videos covering specifics of open media vault and different configurations so i don't want this video to be just a copy of that so uh that is it i hope you learned something from this i hope you think that uh this was worth it um honestly it doesn't matter if you think it was worth it because you didn't buy it but my opinions i think it's cool would i buy it again probably not uh you can get the same type of performance out of an external uh hard drive dock but it is a cool machine and if you have 150 to blow not that you can buy it right now but when it goes on sale if you want to pick one up i wouldn't blame you it definitely is really cool and looks really cool so that is my opinion on it if you want to see more tests on this let me know down in the comments if there's something else you want me to test with the raspberry pi then i'd be happy to know so let me know down in the comments but that is it if you like the video please drop a like if you like content like this please consider subscribing i want to thank all of my patreons and youtube members uh you guys are awesome thank you for supporting the channel it means a lot to me but um that is it if you got this far in the video i sincerely appreciate it thank you so much for watching and i will see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Raid Owl

Views: 44,425

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Id: VJy3PmJvGYU

Length: 21min 1sec (1261 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 04 2022