Argon One M.2 Raspberry Pi 4 Case

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining explainingcomputers.com this time we're going to take a look at this the argon 1 m.2 case for the raspberry pi 4. as the name suggests this has got an internal m.2 slot to take a sata m.2 ssd and it's also got lots of other nice features so let's go and take a closer look right here we have our argon one m.2 which i purchased for 42 pounds here in the uk and which sells for about 45 in the united states so this is therefore a rather expensive raspberry pi 4 case but it does have the m.2 adapter inside it to go from usb to m.2 for the pi and it's got other nice features as i said in the introduction let's see if they are worth the price so let's bring in standard knife to open this thing up and just go down the back like that there we are get into this nice and easy and inside we find hopefully an argon 1m.2 case yes we do or there's also an instruction leaflet inside the box that's always good to have but this is the star of the show the argon one m.2 and as you can see the case is made of metal the top is nice and solid the base is actually a translucent plastic and the base of this case is actually thicker than the original argon one i've got an original argon one here which you can see is is not as tall and that's because the m.2 ssd goes in the base and they just have a thicker base it's jumping around already to accommodate the m.2 ssd we put the caser down like that we can see on the back we've got this cover panel this is a very nice feature this cover is held in place by magnets and underneath we've got the gpio connector which is colour coded and it's got all the pin out printed on the back of the case if we take the case apart i think i'll first remove this plastic cover like that you take it apart properly you'll see that in the two halves of the case there there are let's just take these bits out for a second as well you'll see we've got a circuit board in each half and the pipe plugs into the circuit board in the top half of the case plugs in via its gpio connector so power goes to the pi via gpio there is a power connector on the back of this board which we use rather than the one directly on the pipe and then the m.2 ssd plugs into this board here which is obviously you can see in in the base of the case and then we have a third board little daughter board here which i took out of shot this is a marvelous thing this plugs into the raspberry pi 4 into its audio connector and hdmi connectors and wait for it gives us two full-size hdmi connectors on the back it takes all of the connectors to the back of this case so when the argon one m.2 all the connectors on the back and the hdmi are full size isn't that an amazing thing the case also acts as a heatsink it's got the lugs here which means the metal of the case contacts the cpu on the pi the soc and also the memory and we've also got a little active cooling solution here as well as a 30 millimeter fan which can be temperature controlled if we look down the very front of the case we find this an ir receiver so the pi can be controlled by an infrared remote control and then we also have this the jumper which i'm very pleased to see because we didn't have this jumper on the original argon one and it's associated with the power button because the argon one has got a soft power button for turning the pi on and doing various other things if you install some software but if you want the pie to be turned on purely by using the main adapter and turning that on and off that's what i would want to do then you can move this jumper to the other position so i'm going to leave the jumper where it is the soft power is activated for now but for my own personal use i would switch this jumper to the other position finally lurking in the back of the case right now we find this stowed away is this usb 3 to usb 3 adapter which is used to connect the m.2 board to the raspberry pipes plugs into the back of the argon one and dot two and i wish i had one of these adapters available when i was building my ultimate raspberry pi 4 rig and so there we are all the parts of the argon one m.2 case and so i think it's now high time we went in search of a raspberry pi guess what i've found a raspberry pi 4 and specifically this one mounted in my ultimate raspberry pi 4 rig with two big brass plates a 52 pi ice tower cooler on the top and it's an 8 gigabyte raspberry pi 4 and it's set up to boot from an m.2 saturn ssd which is in this case under here and connected in around there so what i'm going to do is to take the raspberry pi 48 gigabyte model and the m.2 sata ssd from this rig so we can use them in our argon 1 m.2 case and here we are the raspberry pi 4 and the ssd have been released this is a wd green 120 gigabyte sata m.2 ssd and note you could only use a sata m.2 ssd in the argon 1 m.2 case and if you want to know the differences between a sata and nvme or pcie n.2 ssd look in my recent video explaining ssds form factors interfaces and technologies anyway it's now time to start putting things together so we'll take that over there for a second and bring in the daughter board which plugs into the raspberry pi so we'll just put this in here as i do like this gives us the full size hdmi sockets just plugs in nice and careful like that takes a little bit of force so make sure you've got it lined up correctly don't want to damage anything that should go in like that and i think there we are that's rather neat and we've now got the full size hdmi connectors on the the back of the raspberry pi next we'll go across to the base of the argon one case so we can fit the m.2 ssd in here so i'll just remove the retaining screw like this hope that comes out like that and then we can take our n.2 ssd put it into the slot like that drop it down into place and replace the retaining screw so that's a very simple operation our m.2 ssd is now mounted in the argon one thirdly we'll go to the top of the case where i've also got out all of the accessories it came in a little accessory bag we've got some sticky feet here to go on later we don't need those for now we've got a couple of circle pads read those in a second and we've got various screws specifically four short screws and four long screws and the next thing we need to do is to put the thermal pads onto the lugs here so we'll provide cooling passively to the pipe so i'll get on with that and there we are i finally succeeded the tricky bit is getting the backing paper off both sides and we can now take our raspberry pi with its daughter board and fit it into the case and basically it plugs in it squashes down here into the gpo connector squashes down chris it connects properly it squashes down basically it goes in like this gonna make sure everything lines up at the front with the connectors but hopefully it should go in okay we'll just push it down and that's gone in very nicely indeed so what we now want to do is to put in the short screws make sure you get the right screws first the short screws on the inside avoiding what will be the outside screws for the case so let's put in the short screws there we are i think i put those in the right place and the final thing we're going to do is to fit the base of the case onto the top of the case but just before we do that it's worth pointing out this is the pies micro sd card slot and this is covered when you put the base of the case onto the argon one you can't get at it so you have to take the base off to use the the card slot on the pipe now here we're going to be booting from the m.2 drive i've already got that set up to boot the pi from that so i don't need to put in a micro sd card but if you do put it in before you put the base on the case anyway i can now put the base on the case there we are and then finally i just need to put on the sticky feet there we are the feet on the bottom are suitably stuck on and then the very final thing is to take my favorite part of the argon one which is this adapter and to fit this on the back so that we've got a connection between the m.2 drive and the the pi and this simply drops in like that and so there we are that is the argon one all put together we can still get to the gpio connector which lovely little cover on the back this really is a very very solid very high quality unit as you can probably gather i really like the argon one m.2 case greetings here i am back again i've now got everything connected up to test out the argon 1m.2 case connected up to a monitor and a keyboard and to my 3m ergonomic mouse i always like to use so let's boot up the pi press the switch on the back of the argon one end.2 like that and i'll show you the whole boot processor you can see how rapidly a raspberry pi boots into raspberry pi os from an ssd which is a pretty quick process hopefully now i said that it's going to take ages isn't it but in theory it should boot up nice and quickly into raspberry pi os yes we can see the four raspberries there on the screen and hopefully the second will arrive on the raspy pi os desktop come on pi you can do it let's all encourage it there we are at just under 28 seconds that was a pretty rapid boot into raspberry pi o s and while we're here let's launch the terminal let's just check out the ssd let's do an ls vlk list block devices see the drives on the system which are the ssd that's hardly a surprise i guess and let's also run the hd parameters command to check out the read speed of the ssd i've previously installed hd parameters on this raspberry pi 4 so let's just run that very exciting see what result we're going to get all the tension's killing us what's it going to be there we are 291.22 megabytes a second and this is not a surprising result given that the same test on the ultimate raspberry pi 4 rig gave us a result of 293.65 megabytes a second and the only thing that's changed here is the usb 32 n.2 ssd adapter clearly the one in use now is the one in the argon one m.2 and it clearly performs as we would expect it to perform oh and just in case you're wondering the same test for a micro sd card previously go as a result of 40.92 megabytes a second so there we are there's clearly no problems with the m.2 to sp3 adapter in the argon one m.2 so let's now move on to check out its cooling performance right here i am back again and before we run some temperature tests i'm going to install the argon 1 script which controls the fan and the power button and to do that we need to enter this command in the terminal so let's press enter on that there we are this should both download and install the script and there we are it's finished and i think the next thing we need to do is a reboot which would make sense so let's just reboot the pi and here we are back again and over here we've now got some icons for either on installing the script or running a configuration program for configuring the fan speed on the archon one and i'm going to use the defaults in the test i'm about to do but we'll just run this anyway just to show you what happens when we run up that configuration script comes up there do we want to do this yes we do and we can now select to either have the fan always on or we can adjust to temperature at 55 60 and 65 degrees or we can customize behavior and set exactly what we want in terms of the fan so i'll just go into a number two to show you the process and adjusting the temperatures like that and it now says how fast we want the fan going at 55 degrees c the default here is 10 so we'll put that back in and then at 60 degrees the default is 55 we'll put that back in again and at 65 the default is 100 fan is going at full pelt so there we are that's set up so i'm now going to run my standard temperature test and just to show you what that is if you've not seen it before let's just go into the genie programmers editor there and the test is a fairly straightforward bash script i've installed sysbench on this pi and what this does is to have a little loop as you can see here it takes a temperature measurement that uses suspense to stress out the pi cpu by factoring prime numbers to a maximum value of 25 000 kids going through that loop giving us a temperature measurement and it gives us a final temperature measurement on the end so this runs for about 10 minutes stressing out the pie and will give us a range of temperature measurements so to execute this we'll just go to a terminal like that and we'll go to a script i think it's sitting in like that and we'll just run the script there it is like that and there's our first temperature measurement and we'll now speed on through to get a whole set of results and there we are it's finished we have a set of results and they're pretty impressive as you can see the argon 1m.2 never got to the 55 degree threshold to even turn on its fan during this test so i'm very pleased with those results and let's compare them to various other configurations of raspberry pi full cooling i've tried on the channel in the past including a noctua fan and heatsink combination a primer only fan shim the ice tower like i had on my ultimate raspberry pi 4 rig the float case and a raspberry pi 4 heatsink case and if we put results from running the same test on all of these configurations onto a table you can see the argon one comes out pretty well at the end there it's not as impressive as an ice tower or my noctua fan and heatsink combination but it comes in third after that with some very respectable results as we've seen in this video the argon 1 m.2 case turns a raspberry pi 4 into a very stylish small form factor computer now admittedly the case does cost more than a 2 gigabyte raspberry pi 4. but if you want to case up your raspberry pi 4 with an m.2 ssd in a very nice outer shell then the argon 1m.2 is well worth considering but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 347,671

Keywords: Raspberry Pi SSD, Raspberry Pi M.2 SSD, Raspberry Pi 4 M.2 SSD, Argon One M.2 case, Raspberry Pi Argon One, Raspberry Pi SSD case, Raspberry Pi 4 SSD case, Raspberry Pi 4 full size HDMI, Argon One demo, Argon One review, Argon One M.2 demo, Argon One M.2 review, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt

Id: Tgrka088ZFk

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021