Argon40's EON Case Turns a Raspberry Pi 4 Into a Stylish, Four-Bay NAS Appliance

Raspberry Pi housing specialist Argon40 is back on the crowdfunding circuit with its most ambitious design yet: an eye-catching case which turns a Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer into a four-bay SATA network attached storage (NAS) box.

"For years now we have fallen in love with the versatility of the Raspberry Pi and the thousands of projects that the community has developed from this tiny credit card-sized computer," says Argon40's Joseph Li. "It is fitting that we also launch our latest and boldest project here in Kickstarter as we did 4 years ago."

"We are again taking a daring step to uncharted territory and offer the Raspberry Pi community with a more technically sophisticated accessory for our daily computing needs: a Build Your Own Network Attached Storage (BYO-NAS)."

The base of the prism-shaped Argon EON houses a custom circuit board alongside a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer. As with its earlier Argon One case designs, metal pillars come into contact with the Raspberry Pi's SoC and RAM chips — turning the aluminium case into a heatsink.

The bulk of the case is taken up by slots for up to four hard drives - though, oddly, it accepts a maximum of two 3.5in drives and two 2.5in drives with no option to pack it with four full-size hard drives. These connect to a SATA backplane board that, in turn, links through to the Raspberry Pi using a SATA-to-USB bridge — which does, sadly, mean all four drives share a single USB 3.0 lane.

To the top of the case is an OLED display, designed as a system monitor and capable of reading out CPU status, IP address, and other data points - and which can be programmed for more functionality, Argon40 promises. There's a battery-backed real-time clock, and a cooling fan which operates under software control. A hidden panel at the rear even provides access to the Raspberry Pi's general purpose input/output (GPIO) pins for add-on hardware.

The Argon EON crowdfunding campaign is now live on Kickstarter with physical rewards starting at HK$980 (around $126) for an Argon EON with 12V power supply — bring your own Raspberry Pi. Delivery, meanwhile, is slated for December this year.