Building a Powerful Raspberry Pi NAS with the Argon EON Pi Case & OpenMediaVault

OMV does not work in desktop environment anyways

this product really don't make sense. it is cheaper to buy a 2 bay synology, that don't take up the time of building, better OS, support for raid, faster transfer speeds. the only thing i see a PI would do a synology wont is to have wireless connection

great review, straight and to the point. thank you!

No RAID 5? RAID over USB a problem. I run an OWC 4 drive RAID 5 using SoftRAID open a macmini. I was excited about this but all the practical info was at the end.

Great video but Now i have a problem......I can login to my OMV but cannot access the dashboard to see any of the other areas ...i.e. storage, filesystem, users, ect........Please help...

I'd be interested in your thoughts on the pi5, now that that's be announced for this project....

I am trying to figure out how to use my Argon Eon as a cloud server. Any videos would be helpful.

Interesting video, but..... You didn't address 2 important issues I am/was trying to get clarified. 1) Is this case compatable with all raspberry pi's ? and 2) can this case actually hold four 3.5" harddrives?

What do we use for PI modules and case for RAID with a Pi4. Since this EON case wont allow RAID with OMV.

Hi @LearnLinuxTV , is it possible to turn this NAS into a router with 5G HAT and maybe a PiSugar battery HAT if I just use thin Samsung SSDs? If you could make an upgrade video with those, if its possible, would be amazing!

155USD just for the case, now for raspberry pi.... well thats another big issue. this can easily be more expensive than a cheapest 2bay nas from synology that only cost around 200USD or less.

Hi i have a raspberry pi3b+ do you think i can buy this product? Thanks

I came here a man, and now after 19 minutes I feel like a woman that could out swim the other women in this video.

Unfortunately, the approach that this video takes is not for the Raspberry Pi novice looking for help setting up a NAS. This is for the person very familiar to the Raspberry Pi platform interested in a company setup video. I would have preferred a thorough setup video with the ability to advance past areas using time stamps. These videos should be comprehensive and cater to people of all levels of experience. Post production can add time stamps to advance for differing skill levels. This video left me searching for answers.
Two additional points: 1) I am surprised that it was not mentioned that of the total drives, only a maximum of 2 can be 3.5. 2) There is an internal USB port that is not well documented by the manufacturer.

Thanks for this! finally got some inspiration to build my own NAS <3

You seem more comfortable in front of your camera compared to a year ago. Very inspiring!

excellent video. I was thinking about mentioning LVM, but having looked at the video, i believe people will google options. The only one comment comes from installation of open media vault. I think when i was installing it, there was more to it then just the drives. Typically, i usually set up a nas so any device can attach to the media server to play music,films,look at pictures and actually save stuff as backups.

I think a NAS an excellent way to use a pi. I would use Argon because as you said, it's easy to setup. But the price of the argon, is about the same price of a server box, which i can store all my drive (approx 10+). I currently have a probox holding 4 drives, but as your video states, Raid over usb is not allowed. I may use a forked version of your video and combine the pi with the probox but that another project.

Thanks for the info
Cheers

Some benchmarks would have been nice.

Does it support S.M.A.R.T? How is the disk performance?

Those annoying pings with popups... STOP.

Too bad this doesn't have a built-in battery backup.

Will the indie Droid Nova fit into this build instead of the raspberry pi?

I intend to use 2014 2.6ghz mac mini with 2 SSD drives for omv Nas. It's power efficiency is good, and it's well built for the price 2nd hand.

I prefer wifi for a NAS so all devices can connect from anywhere without a cable.

A NAS without RAID? Doesn't that defeat the objective? Also, since the board and disks operate from a low voltage, I would like to see a UPS battery setup with automatic shutdown, that would be seriously cool.

I'm pretty sure they didn't include a battery to avoid shipping issues (batteries are sometimes considered dangerous goods). But I would prefer if they used a more common type of battery like CR2032.

I really liked this case, it looks great, but it's too expensive. In general, Raspberry Pi is no longer a good platform for most applications, especially NAS. There are either cheaper boards that perform just as well, or equally (or a bit more) expensive boards that perform better in this type of application (e.g. ZimaBoard).

Neat item, Argon makes some cool cases, but I still cant reliably purchase a Pi three years later without long wait lists or overpaying on ebay. I dropped them a long time ago when it was obvious they care more for commercial products than home users.

The battery isn't included due to shipping constraints. ALL batteries tend to be treated as fire hazard Lithium Ion these days and can only be shipped by ground.

International and Domestic shipping regulations make the act of shipping even a button cell lithium battery quite a bit more cost prohibitive, even if the cost is just more paperwork or headaches, many just avoid it all together by not including a battery. Then there's the actual risks associated with the batteries, which is why there are strict regulations, even a button cell has enough energy to start a fire given the correct conditions. Regulations, costs, storage and shipping conditions all play a role in deciding if they will include a battery. If they have a ton of these sat in a warehouse somewhere, each containing a battery that is slowing ticking away to: at best being a flat useless battery, at worst a fire starter, and a few other unwanted possibilities in between, it's a lot easier to just say nah, and not include a battery and avoid all of the problems associated.
I won't even go into the headache of RMAs of the entire product for a $1.50 battery that can be found at any dollar store, walmart, heck gas station in the country...

At this point any products that need a Pi is set up for failure.

USB3 is the bottle neck, you can do it... its just tooooo slowwww. Just try to copy a file from on drive to another and you will see how slow it is.
Pi4 Bus is still the problem it can´t handle it.
I would not mind that the pi4 was bigger in size if it had more performance.

nice video. but as nice as this case is, having it as a nas with the rpi is a waste of hardware. no raid, a big no-go for any nas, can't even take advantage of 1 hdd speed, less so for 2 hhd's and 2 ssd's, lots of wasted perf. due to the usb3 connectivity etc. the only thing that makes some sense is having it for like a nice and small media player, or emulation station, provided that you don;t really care if a hdd dies and you lose the data. but there are already other faster and cheaper solutions for that,

Thank you for your video. I've seen it in France but the price is too much expensive, but I like the idea it's possible to do it. I'm wondering if we build the Raid in command line with mdadm before install open media vault, does it work?

Nice to see something other than the typical CUBE NAS. Price point of the box and the lack of availability for the Pi's really limit it. Novel execution, poor value (for now).

it looks like the trash can mac

Without RAID this is not a NAS solution. Its just a nice case with some extra features. If you have a Pi use the money to buy a large external USB drive to get basically the same functionality cheaper.

RPI has long been unobtanium. I'd be more interested in having an insight into what their bottle neck is.

It seems to be a neat solution but delivery outside the US seems to be a problem. Amazon just says not available in Europe :(

👍

The shape of the case is cool.

Well again, nothing against your video, you do a great job, but you can get refurbished stuff for nearly nothing and still have a lot more punch. Yes your power draw may be a tad superior but compared to the price tag of this plus the Raspberry Pi, it's a steal (and again, if you run no gui, I'm pretty sure you may have like 1~3 more watts on idle). Yes there will be no sparkles and but man... I get it that Raspberry pi are open source stuff on ARM etc and maybe ARM will be the future but x86 just works for now (still I would recommand Intel more than AMD on this from my experience). Coming from a Fedora user.

This is actually not bad. Just use sata ssds instead and you're in the races. Just a bit too expensive.

I was totally enthralled with this video until the end. I mean, it's not possible to even set up RAID 0? What's the point of a NAS without out some RAID redundancy? Also, the fact that the HD's are required to go through the USB bus is a huge negative (I assume this is a Raspberry Pi hardware limitation). Another huge minus right now is the total lack of availability of the Pi hardware itself. Anyway, still an interesting video and as always, thank you Jay for the great content.

Could LVM be used in place of RAID, or would that also be unfit for USB devices?

That looks so cool, wish I could get a Pi for a reasonable price. I have a pre-order that's 2 months overdue. thanks for the great review.

A Jonsbo N1 (or N2) NAS case, together with an Intel N5105 cpu/mini-itx motherboard (Aliexpress), won't cost much more than this Pi4 + NAS case, but give you five 3.5" sata drive bays and four 2.5GbE NIC's, and a lot more performance. Raspberry Pi's are still overpriced unobtainium, so I'll pass.

Please review Vanilla OS and blendOS.

I have this device. I get only 6MB/s when transferring files from a computer to the NAS (and vice versa). I expected 100+MB/s. I am sharing via SMB and have the NAS connected via Ethernet to the router, am I missing something?

Well, it's a cool idea and cool looking design, but after the trouble I had with my RockPi Sata "NAS/Cloud" solution, I cannot recommend tinkering with these USB SATA solutions. One day the SATA Platine or USB port can become faulty and cause a lot more of headaches. Having a NAS without a proper functioning RAID is IMO just a temp drive solution. If you really want to store important stuff for a lifetime, you have to make a backup of your NAS storage. You safe more time, money and work by just building a real NAS Solution with a well functioning RAID.