The Apex Storage launches a x21 SSD that supports PCie 4.0 NVMe m.2 168tb storage in a single add-in-card
You wouldn't expect storage devices to be trendy news, but when you have a 168TB PCIe add-in card make its way to the market, it deserves attention. So what's so uniquely impressive about the Apex Storage x21? It has an equivalent of 21 M. 2 NVMe SSDs crammed into a single expansion slot. This equates to 8TB M. 2 2280 sticks and provides impressive transfer speeds of up to 31GB/s.
Even though PCie 5.0 is slowly becoming standard in the consumer market, Apex Storage is sticking with PCie 4.0 SSDs for the X21. Regarding design, the card can fit into any motherboard with a PCie 4.0 X16 expansion slot. The card takes up one expansion slot, measuring just under 275mm long. Ten M. 2 2280 drives alone can fit directly between the sandwich PCB build with room for extra drives on its exterior.
Other key features include a varied industry-leading IOPS, 100 PCie 4.0 lanes, full UEFI / secure boot support, and Windows/ Windows Server/ Linux Raid support compatibility.
As expected, the x21 M. 2 NVMe SSD will demand significant power; a 75W PCie slot will not be enough to maintain continuous operation. This is why Apex fitted the card with 6-pin power connectors. This will push potential max power to 225W; according to the o company, the revealed specs on the heavily populated active storage card will consume just 95W of power. If you closely observe the image below, the finned heatsink on the card controller is shrouded between the PCB. This gives the impression that there s a limited passive cooling solution. But Apex has stated airflow at a minimum will be 400LFM.
The card has 100 PCie 4.0 lanes, indicating that this incorporated PCie switch allows drives to connect back to the CPU.
You probably won't find many users who need a PCIe add-in card with 168TB of storage. Unless, of course, whatever projects you're engaged in require that many terabytes of storage space. I'm more impressed with the card performance capabilities, which include 31GB/s transfer speed ( which we mentioned earlier in the post) and IOPS, which goes as high as 7.5 million.
Apex has provided no information regarding pricing or availability for the X21 PCie storage card.
