The Apex Storage X21 comes in the form of a card that sits on a PCIe x16 slot and can be thought of as a graphics card… But the real function of this machine is to be able to install up to 21 MVME SSDs! And with a card like that (and a lot of money), you can do as the American Sabrent who has fully equipped the Apex Storage X21 with its own 8Tb SSDs from the Rocket 4 Plus series. The result of the operation: 168Tb of SSD storage.
Using PCIe 4.0 x16 as an interface, a maximum of about 32 GB/s can be achieved. Obviously, this card is not really intended for the general public. First of all, don’t expect to install it “quietly” in your PC. In addition to its PCIe slot, you will need to connect two 6-pin sockets for PCIe connectors so that the card can handle a maximum power consumption of 225 watts. As you can see from the images, the SSDs that equip the card (Samsung here) are mounted bare and therefore without additional heatsink. Therefore, the manufacturer recommends a certain amount of airflow in the case. Especially since you can see that the card is built in a sandwich form with two PCBs coming almost on top of each other.
For the manufacturer, the commercial use of this card could be for example in the field of machine learning. Indeed, its compact format allows to offer an alternative to the classical flash bays obviously much more voluminous.
