In short: I’ve at all times had a knack for excessively quick storage techniques, and Apex Storage’s new X21 has actually caught my consideration. The Apex Storage X21 is a dual-board add-in card that may accommodate a whopping 21 PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs. And no, that wasn’t a typo.
In keeping with Apex’s web site, all main manufacturers of M.2 NMVe SSDs are supported together with QLC, TLC, MLC and Intel Optane drives. RAID deployments in Home windows and Linux are additionally supported, the corporate notes.
What kind of choices are you relating to configuration? I suppose that depends upon what you might be aiming to perform together with your construct.
In keeping with Apex’s web site, you’ll be 168TB of storage when populating every slot with an 8TB SSD. Future 16TB drives might push capability as much as 336TB. Optionally, you could possibly load it up with lower-capacity playing cards with a concentrate on pace.
Apex says that with a single card, you may count on sequential learn speeds of as much as 30.5GB/s and sequential writes of 26.5GB/s. Add within the second card and max speeds leap to 107GB/s on the sequential learn aspect and 70GB/s for sequential writes.
Do you want this? Virtually actually not. Plus, it might value a small fortune to totally configure it. Even with the low cost of flash reminiscence immediately, it might nonetheless value over $5,000 to fill it with Samsung 990 Professional 2TB drives – and that doesn’t even embody the price of the add-in card itself. Commerce out the Samsung 990 Professionals for Sabrent’s 8TB Rocket 4 Plus NVMe SSDs, at the moment going for $1,099.99 each on Amazon, and your SSD invoice skyrockets to over $23,000.
The cardboard does come backed by a lifetime guarantee. Sadly, Apex has not mentioned when the X21 will launch or how a lot it should promote for. It’s also a bummer that it doesn’t help PCIe 5.0 drives however then once more, making an attempt to maintain 21 of these cool can be a severe problem.
