To meet their high-capacity storage needs, the average consumer is turning to hard disk drives (HDD). They are generally not as fast or reliable as SSDs, but they are much cheaper. The Apex X21 Storage Add-on Card (AIC) currently circulating on the Internet, however, is not about using the most cost-effective storage. Instead, the expansion card, which appears to be a new product from a hitherto unknown storage company, is for individuals or companies willing to spend what it takes to populate the card with up to 21 8TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD drives. .
Tom Hardware first spotted the X21’s website Sunday, and Henry Hill, in engineering and sales for the company, confirmed the product to Ars Technica via email. He said the product will cost $2,800, with discounts available for bulk purchases, which will ship by the second quarter. He said samples are already available to wholesale customers, and deliveries to consumers will begin “before the end of 2023.”
MIke Spicer, listed as founder and CEO of Apex Storage, launched a Kickstarter in 2021 with a similar concept to X21. Instead of 21 M.2 SSDs, Apex Storage Scaler claimed to support a modest 16 SSDs. It is unclear how many, if any, of these tickets reached backers. However, in July, Spicer hinted at a “V2” for the product Twitter.
The product page for the X21 states that the AIC runs in a standard PCIe 4.0 x16 slot. The pictures show 10 holes and a heatsink inside a pair of printed circuit boards (PCB).
There are also 11 holes on the outside of the PCB. According to the report, the card is full-length, full-length, and supports QLC, TLC, MLC, and Intel Optane engines. In terms of operating systems, there is support for Windows 10, 11 and Server as well as Linux.
“The card is PCIe-deployed, so RAID support will be provided by a third-party software or hardware solution, such as Graid,” Hill told Ars Technica.
Apex Storage also expects the AIC to be able to support up to 336TB if 16TB M.2 2280 SSDs hit the market.
Speaking of forward-looking, this component isn’t technically future-proof, as it doesn’t support PCIe 5.0 (it’s backwards compatible with PCIe 3.0). But while the X21 isn’t aimed at budget-conscious users who opt for hard drives, going with PCIe 5.0 SSDs will cost more. The cooling requirements of the AIC will also increase. As it is, the X21 requires 400 LFM (linear feet per minute) airflow.
In terms of performance, Apex Storage claims sequential read and write speeds of 30.5 and 26.5Gbps, respectively, while the multi-card system claims speeds of 107GBps and 70GBps, respectively. The Apex Storage website also reports 7.5 million random reads IOPS and 6.2 million random writes IOPS with a single card, with those numbers increasing to 20 million and 10 million, respectively, in a multi-card configuration.
Apex Storage sees the X21 being used for NAS or SAN arrays, 8K video editing, machine learning and AI training, and other use cases, including premium enterprise ones. Given the high price of 21 PCIe 4.0 SSDs, the company can offer a more realistic appeal to businesses than to individuals. Filling out an AIC can cost more than $21,000 to the average consumer, plus the price of the ticket itself. Alternative products, such as the HighPoint SSD7540, can start at $1,099 but have smaller maximum capacities (64TB in the case of the SSD7540).
Without previous products, it’s hard to tell if a self-described Utah-based PCIe Design Company AIC will be able to deliver on its promises. But it would be interesting to know.