Over $23,000 Worth of Sabrent SSDs Deliver 168TB at 31 GB/s

Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus SSD is one of the best SSDs around. Now imagine glomming 21 of these PCIe 4.0 SSDs together, because that's precisely what Sabrent has planned for the company's next product. The upcoming Sabrent Apex X21 Destroyer will arrive with 21 Rocket 4 Plus 8TB drives to offer unprecedented storage capacity and transfer speeds.

Sabrent is still conducting in-house testing on the Apex X21 Destroyer. However, the company said it easily achieved sequential read and write speeds of 31 GB/s. Sabrent's results even surpassed Apex Storage's figures, which rate the X21 with a sequential performance of 30.5 GBps reads and 28.5 GBps writes.

If you look at the brand's past products, such as the Sabrent RocketQ Battleship, Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus Destroyer, or Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus Destroyer 2, it's easy to see that Sabrent has a sweet tooth for big storage solutions. However, the Sabrent Apex X21 Destroyer is on an entirely different level. Previous solutions saw Sabrent assembling a crew of eight SSDs. Now, the Sabrent Apex X21 Destroyer has enough landscape for 21 drives, offering almost three times the storage and significantly more performance.

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Zhiye Liu
News Editor and Memory Reviewer

Zhiye Liu is a news editor and memory reviewer at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

  • Amdlova
    Really impressive... imagine now one bad stick....
    It will be a nightmare
    Reply
  • drtweak
    Now only if there was some kind of imposer or device that could then say use the bandwidth of PCIe 5.0, but have 4.0 devices like this connected to it. So even though each device would still be 4.0, could utilize the speed of 5.0. Yea you could just use 5.0 drives, but what would be the fun in creating that device then.
    Reply
  • kjfatl
    Amdlova said:
    Really impressive... imagine now one bad stick....
    It will be a nightmare
    What happens if you have a bad sector on a single SSD? The software maps around it. If the drivers for this module are any good they will incorporate bad-sector, bad-drive and even bad pcie-lane logic. Some users might even set this us as RAID using 2 or more boards in a single system.
    Reply
  • abufrejoval
    drtweak said:
    Now only if there was some kind of imposer or device that could then say use the bandwidth of PCIe 5.0, but have 4.0 devices like this connected to it. So even though each device would still be 4.0, could utilize the speed of 5.0. Yea you could just use 5.0 drives, but what would be the fun in creating that device then.
    Well and why use PCIe 4.0 devices when you are bandwidth constrained on the host link: I really like the idea of recycling four of my PCIe 3.0 1TB NVMe devices into one 4TB drive delivering PCIe 5.0 bandwidth in pretty much a 2.5" form factor that connects to an M.2 socket on the board via a ribbon cable.

    To my understanding PCIe switches do store-and-forward processing of packets, not just lane switching, so aggregating bandwidths should be possible. But since I've never seen that anywhere, I'm not very sure I got the theory right.

    Yet the single most important obstacle to all of this seems the economy, because PCIe switch chips are crazy expensive, even more so if they support PCIe 5.0.

    And those prices again are something I just don't understand because the IOD in a Ryzen SoC is essentially such a PCIe switch (and does even more stuff like Infinity Fabric, DRAM, USB, SATA) yet can be had with a hexacore Ryzen 5 5600 CPU included for around €100.
    Reply
  • camtasia_kid
    Clear to me that $23,000 is a small price to pay, for having my ProxMox and TrueNas lab load a bit quicker. Mercifully, through blind luck, my DogeCoin and BTC gains have been substantial, so I can help Sabrent test this, without my wife or children even noticing the purchase. The wife does get angry when I bring in hardware that makes noise, such as recent servers from HPE. Besides, even if she does notice, I make the money in this family, she can go pound sand.
    Reply