On the packaging of the Argon Eon, it says “Maximum single volume size: 18 TB”, but on the kickstarter it also says “Maximum capacity of each HDD bay is 10 TB for a total of 40 TB capacity.”.
So is it that 18 TB single volume means that the maxiumum is to run 2x10TB as one volume?
In short what is the larges HDDs I can put in and use in my EON?
You can use HDDs as large as possible. The case limits this not. The only limiting factor here is the Raspberry Pi itself.
Yes, but what that means in practice?
Let’s say I choose a RPi 4 8GB. How is that connected with the capacity of the HDDs or SSDs?
Its not connected at all. The amount of memory a computer is not related to the amount of DISK storage it can access. The Bigger issue is how much POWER the disks will consume at startup and during runtime. If it exceeds the amount of power supplied by the power supply you will have data corruption, and possible drives dropping offline.
Yes, I understand that!
Yet the Argon40 team mention specific maximum capacities. So, I guess it is somehow connected with the max power the RPi 4 can handle?
Anyway, it would be nice to have an official Argon40 answer…
You can get an approximate number by looking at the power supply (wall wart). I don’t have mine you, or I would do it… basically take the voltage supplied to the device (12 I think) and multiply it by that amps, that gives you watts… so a 5 amp 12 volt supply would provide 60 watts of power MAXIMUM.
Now look at the drives and see their max draw, and add them all up. must be less that 60 (for for this example)… I don’t know the actual number as I don’t have my unit yet. And remember what ever it is is the max that can be drawn.
Great!
Thanks for that info, very useful!
I have 2 x Seagate IronWolf 8 TB NAS drives installed in my unit which is running on RAID Mirror and I plan to add 2 x Seagate 5TB 2.5" drives in the remaining bays. I don’t believe there is much power difference between a 1TB and a 10TB drive so long as the power supply remains solid.
I have been copying files over onto my system since this morning and I am more concerned about the heat currently being kicked out of the unit. (but this is with 3TB being transferred to it).
The highest power load of a spinning disk is startup. Lots of large systems stagger the drives to control the amount of power consumed. Worst one I ever saw was like 15 watts (rated) more like 20 actually measured.
We have tested the 18TB Seagate and it worked just fine (After the Kickstarter Campaign was posted). So we indicated it in the packaging specs.
Yes, different HDDs require different power and the 2 middle HDD Bays are the only slots that can handle a 3.5 Inch HDD. The two slots on the sides can only power 2.5 Inch.
We don’t expect a lot of users though to use the 18TB at the moment as it is still crazy expensive.
Based on this - I am still a bit curious about what the limit is.
Would I for example be able to use two 3.5" 12TB drives (Seagate, WD or whatever)? Would I be able to use two 14TB drives? Would I be able to have any 2.5" disks in addition to the 3.5" drives in the two scenarios?
In short: What is the maximum amount of usable storage space I can put in (and use efficiently) and in what disk constellation would that be? Independently if the limitation comes from the EON itself or the Raspberry Pi that it is designed for. Is the limiting factor the 60W power supply?
The limiting factor is the power supply. Drives need 12 and 5 volts. They need a specific amount of power to spin up (drive dependent) and consume a a specific amount of power to move the heads.
The power requirements are documented for each drive, but sometimes the disk vendors don’t represent the power consumed by startup properly.
SSD’s always use less power…
So it greatly depends on power requirements of the drives you select to put in your EON.
So I have 2 2.5" SSDs in the outer SATA ports and 2 3.5" HDD (2TB and 4TB) in the inner SATA ports. When I do this, the unit doesn’t power on all the way. Raspi bootloader pops up, then the screen goes black and the system just hangs while the fans are going. These drives are normal desktop drives so i’m not sure why it would be a power issue. The pi boots up fine when I remove all the drives but as soon as I add them, this situation occurs. Thoughts?
try one spinning drive record if it works.
try the other spinning drive if that works, add the first one back in (if it worked).
Could be that both drives spinning up is drawing more than the amount of power that can be consumed.
Also what size drives and model number? Manufacturer?
@NHHiker I was following that thought process as well. Actually ended up being a mixture of corrupt partitions and the boot order being set to USB before I wanted it to be (aka had the M2 card installed). So it was creating corrupt arrays, rebooting, and then trying to boot from the empty data drives instead of the SD.
Cool, Glad it’s working. I should have thought about whacking the partitions first. I had a bunch of old drives, settled on two old 1TB Western Digital drives (like 2010/11 … lol), and two micron M510s… so basically 4TB. Not much but enough to try out what I want to.
If it works well, I’ll get some new drives. Basically setting up a system for fire storage. i.e. move data onto the box, and it is automatically copied (via secure VPN) to a system at another site.
Ordered 2x8TB 3.5” 
Let’s see if it works 
Can confirm 2 x Seagate IronWolf 12 TB NAS (ST12000VNZ008) are working just fine.
Very tight fit. Argon did there homework
Currently copying 2TB over and temp looks good. My camera wouldn’t focus.
Installing the drives from the left hand side was easier as there is a protrusion on the right.
Update mine got to 56℃ fan to full and opened the sides.
If you go to the following Seagate website link
there are numerous documents with lots of data outlining the specific power consumption for all of their drives under all conditions.
Suffice to say, no one drive exceeded 10W on average.
HOWEVER, the startup power consumption required is 25.45W, so if I’m reading this right, the Argon EON device is rated at 60W, and that leaves a bit under 10W of wiggle room for everything else, assuming two 18TB drives. Apparently, according to this website, Seagate Ironwolf now produces a 20TB NAS drive as well. Howrah. Good time ahead.
The specific document is at
The specific information is on page 12