Sabrent Shows Off An Insane 21 Rocket 4 Plus 8 TB SSDs Equipped To A Single APEX Storage AIC For 168 TB Capacities

SSD manufacturer, Sabrent, has shown off 21 of its Rocket 4 Plus 8 TB SSDs attached to a single Apex Storage AIC for up to 168 TB capacities.

Sabrent Equips Apex Storage's X21 Destroyer AIC With 21 Rocket 4 Plus SSDs For 168 TB Capacities On A Single Card

Earlier this year, we discussed the new company Apex Storage and its PCIe Gen 4 AIC that can support an impressive 21 M.2 solid state drives, 100 PCIe lanes, and 168 TB of capacity per card. The card did not have much information to go on previously other than the company's product page. On Thursday, the card appeared again, but this time on Sabrent's Twitter page, showing the card with 21 of their own Rocket 4 Plus 8 TB NVMe SSDs.

The tweet below from Sabrent offers a few photos of the Apex Storage Apex X21 PCIe Gen 4 AIC with the 21 Rocket 4 Plus SSDs installed.

At Sabrent, we run on the cutting edge of technology. Working with Apex, we received one of these new cards and currently running it through tests. We call this the Sabrent Apex X21 Destroyer. 21X 8TB SSDs for 168TB of storage on single card ! pic.twitter.com/xU3PooZ9f4

— Sabrent America (@Sabrent) April 13, 2023

The Apex Storage Apex X21 card does not appear to have changed much in design since we last talked about it, but it looks like it's no longer a conceptual product if early prototypes are being sent out to SSD makers. After heading over to Apex Storage's company website, no pricing is shown except for the customer service bot at the bottom of the screen, informing that the initial pricing for the card is $2,800.

Heading over to Sabrent's product page for the Rocket 4 Plus SSD pictured in the tweet, you can see that an 8TB card will set users back $1,099.99, a sale price compared to the regular pricing of $1,499.99. Grabbing out the calculator, the retail price of the card with the SSDs installed will cost a user $23,099.79 at the sale price and $31,499.79 and the manufacturer's retail cost. Add the card to the cost, and we are looking at $25,899.79, or $34299.79. That is quite expensive for memory, even for a storage enthusiast, which caused a little more investigating about how this card initially came to fruition.

Apex Storage created a Kickstarter campaign for the Storage Scaler a few years ago. This card uses 16 M.2 SSDs to perform similarly to the above product, just a slightly slimmed-down version. Three use cases where a card would become useful were presented in the campaign's text:

Low cost, high density SATA based storage solution: With the Storage Scaler Card massive cost savings are available for deploying large solid state storage solutions. With many industries increasing demand on NVME based drives, our product provides you a platform to build your own large scale storage solution and fast SSD array at a fraction of the cost of previous industry solutions.

High resolution video editing: The size of media required for 4k and 8k video demands fast and robust storage solutions to speed up editing and processing.

Storage caching. Many systems benefit from having access to large solid state cache arrays but often such systems are limited by the number of PCIe lanes available by the CPU or physical slots. The Storage Scaler allows you to access a massive number of additional ports while taking up minimal space and system resources.

Cryptocurrency Mining and Plotting: Storage based Cryptocurrencies like CHIA, FILECOIN, ANKR, SIA, STORJ, etc. benefit from low cost, high density and high availability storage arrays. To maximize your return on investment you need massive amounts of space while maintaining cost efficiency . The Storage Scaler will provide you the capability to build epic storage arrays that are up for the challenge.

— Apex Storage Scaler Kickstarter campaign

The card, at the time, was designed during the chip shortage of 2020-2021 and did not require any external cooling, using the system's cooling components to maintain the temperatures. This new design increases the capacity and brings the card into 2023 by combining two PCBs into a single PCIe interface and offering a power consumption of 225W. It is stated on the website that the card can produce 31 GB/s R/W speeds with 10M+ IOPS.

We are anticipating more information about the collaboration and final pricing, and its high density with low-cost overhead will be fantastic for industrial use in data servers. Interested users can check out the product page here.

Written by Jason R. Wilson