The mother of all M.2 storage has arrived! A company called Apex Storage has announced their X21 add-in-card which has room for 21 PCI-Express 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSDs! This means the card, when fully-populated with 8TB NVMe SSDs would support up to 168TB of storage! The card will also boast speeds of 30.5 GB/s!
Apex Storage has packaged the card in a single-slot, add-in-card. This is made for workstations and applications like enterprise and machine learning. On board you’ll find 100 PCIe lane, which is made possible by a PCIe switch (which we assume is under the heatsink). The card is actually a two PCB design with them connecting to each other. Based on their design it seems they would be easy enough to take apart to install your drives.
The card does require extra power and you’ll find two 6-pin PCIe power connectors on it that will give it a total of 225W of power. Apex Storage showed the card with Samsung’s 990 Pro SSDs installed, but it also will support Intel Optane drives. No word yet on pricing, but expect this card to have a hefty premium!
Via Apex Storage
