Sabrent has shown off what’s it’s called the Sabrent Apex X21 Destroyer, a single PCIe add-in card (AIC) that houses 21 of the company’s 8TB Rocket NVMe 4.0 SSDs, for a total storage of 168TB on one device.
The card is made by a company called Apex Storage, and it can house up to 21 of any standard M.2 SSD. It then uses a custom controller – with a hefty heatsink – to manage the load of the SSDs and deliver up to 31GBps transfer speed via the card’s single PCIe 4.0 interface.
So many M.2 slots can this card hold that it actually uses two PCBs to house them all, with the two boards sandwiched tightly together and joined by a PCIe interface. The board even appears to be a single PCIe slot design, which is mighty impressive.
Apex bills the X21 Destoyer as being ideal for machine learning and hyper-converged infrastructure applications, the latter being data center applications where all aspects of a system are virtualized; computing, storage, and networking. So, it’s not exactly for speeding up your game load times.
That’s a fact also reflected in the price of this card, which although not officially listed on the company’s website is reported as starting from $2,800. Then again, when you consider that a single 8TB version of Sabrent’s excellent Rocket 4.0 SSD – currently listed as our best value gaming SSD in our best SSD list – costs a whopping $1,100, value shouldn’t be your top priority when putting together a storage solution like this. All told, the combined price of this 168TB setup would be a cool $25,899.79. We’ll take three!
So, while the Sabrent Apex X21 Destroyer might not be for most of us – or may in fact not see the light of day as a commercial product – we can at least recommend Sabrent’s more day-to-day drives, which you can read more about in our Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 review.
Have you experimented with PCIe SSD solutions before or would you be tempted by perhaps a more modest multi-drive board like this? Let us know your thoughts via the Custom PC Facebook or Twitter pages, or join our Custom PC and Gaming Setup Facebook group and tap into the knowledge of our 350,000+ members.