Apex Storage is a relatively new company in the field of enterprise storage, but they wanted to start their journey in a notable way, and their solution demonstrates it Apex Storage X21.
This device is an AIC (Add-In-Card) that allows you to integrate up to 21 SSD units in M.2 PCIe 4.0 format. If we use 8TB drives and combine two of these cards, we could have a spectacular storage capacity of 336TB, but beware: that option does not come cheap.
The people in charge of Apex Storage are Mike Spicer and Henry Hill. The first one already launched a similar product on Kickstarter in 2021: it was called Storage Scaler and allowed adding 16 M.2 SATA modules. This Apex Storage X21 It seems to be an improved version of that product, although for now they have opted for the PCIe 4.0 standard, perhaps to avoid the high cost of current PCIe 5.0 drives.
This card occupies a full PCIe slot and is 274.2mm long. It is compatible with PCIe 3.0 slots, but if we use it with those slots the performance will be noticeably poorer. By using PCIe 4.0 slots and SSD drives with that connection, we can enjoy spectacular transmission speeds.
actually with a card it reaches 30.5 GB/s in reading and 28.5 GB/s in writing, but in multi-card configurations that performance can increase up to 107 GB/s and 80 GB/s in reading and writing respectively. The card supports RAID configurations on Windows and Linux, allowing precisely those transfer rates to be achieved.
This AIC also has a “dual” version that allows the use of precisely double the number of modules, which gives the possibility of connecting up to 42 SSD modules. The price for that Apex Storage card is $2,800, about 2,600 euros.
To that price you have to add the cost of the 42 SSD drives. If we choose 8 TB models, which are currently around 1,200 euros, the price for that set of units is 50,400 euros, which makes a total of 53,000 euros approximately with a total capacity of 336 TB.
If instead we choose 4 TB units, currently much cheaper (there are models for about 300 euros) the cost is reduced to 12,600 euros for the modules, with a resulting total cost of approximately 15,200 euros and a capacity of “only” 168TB.
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