Sabrent’s Rocket 4 Plus SSD is one of the best SSDs out there. Imagine gromming 21 of these PCIe 4.0 SSDs together. Because that’s exactly what Sabrent has planned for its next product. The upcoming Sabrent Apex X21 Destroyer features 21 Rocket 4 Plus 8TB drives, offering unprecedented storage capacity and transfer speeds.
Sabrent conducts internal testing of the Apex X21 Destroyer. However, the company says it easily achieved sequential read and write speeds of 31 GB/s. Sabrent’s results put the X21’s sequential performance at 30.5 GBps read and 28.5 GBps write, which he even surpassed Apex Storage’s numbers.
Looking at the brand’s past offerings, such as the Sabrent RocketQ Battleship, Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus Destroyer, and Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus Destroyer 2, it’s easy to see that Sabrent has a sweet tooth for high-capacity storage solutions. However, the Sabrent Apex X21 Destroyer is on a whole different level. In the previous solution, Sabrent assembled his crew of eight of his SSDs. Now the Sabrent Apex X21 Destroyer he has enough landscape for 21 drives, offering almost triple the storage and significantly better performance.
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Sabrent’s Apex X21 Destroyer is based on Apex Storage’s X21. While Sabrent’s previous AIC leveraged the HighPoint SSD7540 PCIe 4.0 x16 RAID card, the Apex Storage X21 does not feature a RAID controller. Instead, it utilizes a pair of unnamed PCIe 4.0 switches. This gives the consumer more freedom to configure his AIC to suit his needs. Nevertheless, Apex Storage X21 is bootable and supports RAID arrays via software or third-party hardware solutions like GRAID.
The X21 features a passive cooling design as the main target for riser cards is the server market. However, when deployed within a regular system or workstation, the X21 requires some form of active cooling assistance. This is because so many PCIe 4.0 SSDs packaged together put out a fair amount of heat. Apex Storage recommends at least 400 LFM airflow for the X21. Additionally, the X21 has quite a few drives, so the AIC needs two 8-pin PCIe power connectors to power a whole lot of SSDs. It’s basically like a high-end graphics card when fully loaded, at least in terms of power requirements.
It’s worth pointing out that max performance is limited by the x16 PCIe 4.0 connection to the card. A single Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 8TB can reach peak transfer rates of just over 7,000 MB/s in our testing, so a total of 21 could theoretically deliver 147 GB/s. increase. However, x16 PCIe 4.0 slots top out at 16 GT/s per lane, and 128b/130b encoding limits the actual throughput to a maximum of 31.5 GB/s.
Sabrent hasn’t set a price for the Apex X21 Destroyer yet, nor does it have an estimated timeframe for when the AIC will be released. Considering the current retail price of each Rocket 4 Plus 8TB SSD, $1,099 (opens in new tab) (Which is down from the official suggested retail price of $1,999 at launch), it would be foolish to think the Apex X21 Destroyer will sell for less than $23,000. Plus, the X21 sells for his $2,800, so you have to factor that into the price. Even though Apex Storage offers discounts for bulk purchases, the X21 is priced at AM and 1 leg.
