Briefly: I’ve all the time had a knack for excessively quick storage programs, and Apex Storage’s new X21 has definitely 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 line 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 will depend on what you’re aiming to perform along with your construct.

In line 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 deal with pace.

Apex says that with a single card, you’ll be able to 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 facet and 70GB/s for sequential writes.

Do you want this? Virtually definitely not. Plus, it might value a small fortune to completely configure it. Even with the low value of flash reminiscence at present, it might nonetheless value over $5,000 to fill it with Samsung 990 Professional 2TB drives – and that doesn’t even embrace the price of the add-in card itself. Commerce out the Samsung 990 Professionals for Sabrent’s 8TB Rocket 4 Plus NVMe SSDs, presently going for $1,099.99 every 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 would promote for. It’s also a bummer that it doesn’t help PCIe 5.0 drives however then once more, attempting to maintain 21 of these cool can be a severe problem.