Apex Storage, a rather new company in the world of storage, is unveiling its X21, an AIC (Add-in-card) offering no less than 21 slots for M.2 SSDs. The latter unveils its X21, an AIC (Add-in-card) offering no less than 21 slots for M.2 SSDs… Yes, yes, 21 M.2 slots on a single card!
X21: up to 336TB of storage on a single PCIe card from Apex Storage!
This X21 is presented as a classic PCIe card in single slot full height format. However, it still has two PCBs to distribute the 21 M.2 slots that make it up. In any case, this gives us a very, very high storage density. If we use 8TB SSDs, the card has a total capacity of 168TB against 336TB with 16TB models.
Nevertheless, to handle so many SSDs and provide 100 PCIe lines, we imagine that the card has an integrated PCIe switch. Moreover, the latter should be hidden under the central passive heatsink. Despite the absence of a fan on the card, the brand specifies that an airflow of at least 400 LFM is necessary to ensure proper operation of the card. Moreover, we will also notice that the SSDs do not have any internal heatsink.
In terms of performance, we should find something that bombs a minimum. The company announces 30.5 GB / s with 10 million IOPS in reading / writing. As for the latencies, we must count 79 ms in reading and 52 ms in writing. Finally for the power supply, we find two PCIe 6-pin connectors for a total power of 225W.
All that remains is to know the price, but it looks expensive!
