Anybody kicking themselves that they missed out on the Argon EON (opens in new tab) whereas it was nonetheless in Kickstarter has one other probability to leap aboard the DIY Raspberry Pi (opens in new tab) powered NAS prepare, as 52Pi has revealed a mini tower NAS package, as reported by Liliputing (opens in new tab).
There’s extra Pi than storage within the 3D printed case, nonetheless, because the tower solely accepts a single M.2 SSD (SATA, as much as 2TB), linked by way of a USB bridge, whereas the Raspberry Pi 4 (opens in new tab) board itself is cooled by an ICE Tower HSF cooler, which appears to be like like one thing that must be on prime of the most effective CPUs for gaming (opens in new tab) fairly than a quad-core Arm chip.
The case comes with clear side-panels so you’ll be able to admire the cooling fan in motion, in addition to a 0.96-inch 128 x 64 I2C OLED for important info reminiscent of how low it’s protecting the processor temperature. There is a slot within the aspect for entry to the HDMI and USB Kind-C energy ports, however in any other case cable administration is neat and tidy, although the board is seated in what some will little doubt contemplate to be the fallacious place, with its USB and Ethernet ports dealing with the entrance of the case fairly than being discreetly angled towards the again.
This does no less than get pleasure from permitting USB peripherals to be plugged in additional simply, however means you could possibly find yourself with an Ethernet cable protruding the entrance of your PC. A right-angled GPIO extender is equipped, permitting you to connect a ribbon cable that may attain out to your Raspberry Pi HAT primarily based electronics initiatives, although one isn’t included within the package.
The package is accessible with or with out an precise Raspberry Pi board, however the two choices accessible on AliExpress are for 4GB and 8GB fashions and nearly seem like bargains given how arduous such boards have been to trace down just lately (opens in new tab).
Regardless of being billed as a NAS package, the 52Pi mini tower could also be higher at turning the Pi right into a workable desktop laptop – all that cooling means overclocking (opens in new tab) must be straightforward, and the presence of the SSD ought to assist with boot instances and normal responsiveness. It’s a very nice case and cooler combo that deserves to be seen, which makes the imperfections in its design tougher to bear. The case is accessible from Amazon (opens in new tab) as a barebones unit, or AliExpress (opens in new tab) in the event you want a Pi board bundle.