Apex Storage Add-In-Card Hosts 21 M.2 SSDs, up to 168 TBs of Storage

[Berfs1]

If we are talking about performance, there's no other way, if not, look at apple, even them had no other choice to use a Mac Pro, which still uses a huge space.

So if performance is what you are looking at, this drive is not for you.

iF PerFoRMaNCe iS WhAT yO... okay do you not realize there is a 32GBps cap with PCIe 4.0 x16, or are you intentionally choosing to ignore that fact? BECAUSE there is a 32GBps ceiling, you cannot get faster performance with faster drives if that goes past the 32GBps mark. So no, optane drives won't magically make it faster. Plus, a lot of folks that want this card, would like to buy this and put in a secondary machine as a NAS, or maybe they have one of the new HEDT platforms with a lot of PCIe lanes at their disposal, and want to put it in their primary workstation as maybe a data transfer drive. I mean, if I were to use this and money were no object, I probably would have twin cards, 2 pairs of RAID 0, 8TB NVMes, 168TB per card, and I would probably record gameplay in near lossless quality, shit maybe even 1440p or 4K lossless, and storage would not be an issue at all. Granted having an HEDT CPU would have so many cores you could just do x264 recording and use up all the threads, or even AV1 recording tbh... back to the original point, that's where there is a legitimate use for this, and you seem to think the only use for a card with a bunch of m.2 cards is only for risers... that's not what everyone needs or wants. You need to understand that everyone's needs can be different, and this card was designed primarily for m.2 SSDs in mind (because that's what the product pictures show).

 

[LabRat 891]

When talking about Optane or 'max perf NVMe RAID': The use case / application defines just what "performance" means.

If you were running caching and/or 'big data' network infrastructure, Optane is king. Optane is generally considered 'fast but overpriced' (to the gamer / enthusiast) due to its best 'values' largely being "deep into diminishing return$". The the fast access time (between slow DRAM and the fastest NAND), high 4K perf, and its extreme write-endurance make it worthwhile for scientific application/AI-MI RnD, "Big Data" and large-scale network infastructure.
Proof: Literally why/how Intel even had a market for their purposefully-proprietary (and extremely limited in Xeon-platforms supported) Optane NVDIMMs.

Also, those applications had to spec their own new interface/form-factor for NVMe: Meet EDSFF (Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor)

Intel® Optane™ SSD DC P5811X Series Firmware Version: L0310353

NVMe SSD

Gen4

1.4

MI 1.1

E1.S

NVM

v16.0

January 13, 2022

For on/off-loading and editing many TBs of raw data/footage, the "serving suggestion" for this product is 'max performance'
21x of Samsung's newest Gen4 M.2 NVMe drives should do very well in sustained reads and writes, while allowing enough 'room'.

I'm a fan of Optane (to an unhealthy extreme, potentially) But:
Beyond 2-4 'cheaper' Optane drives in RAID0 (for Boot or 'Scratch') or used w/ ZFS, the real cost-benefit curve 'nosedives' for most Individuals' potential uses.
-Even the 'halo-tier edge-case end-(power)-users'... They can 'tier' storage if they need it. lest they'll be spending more on storage than they probably did on their house, etc.


I think I basically said what Berfs1 said, but a different way (and from the perspective of someone that knows more about Optane than he could ever hope to put to good use)

 

[enb141]

iF PerFoRMaNCe iS WhAT yO... okay do you not realize there is a 32GBps cap with PCIe 4.0 x16, or are you intentionally choosing to ignore that fact? BECAUSE there is a 32GBps ceiling, you cannot get faster performance with faster drives if that goes past the 32GBps mark. So no, optane drives won't magically make it faster. Plus, a lot of folks that want this card, would like to buy this and put in a secondary machine as a NAS, or maybe they have one of the new HEDT platforms with a lot of PCIe lanes at their disposal, and want to put it in their primary workstation as maybe a data transfer drive. I mean, if I were to use this and money were no object, I probably would have twin cards, 2 pairs of RAID 0, 8TB NVMes, 168TB per card, and I would probably record gameplay in near lossless quality, shit maybe even 1440p or 4K lossless, and storage would not be an issue at all. Granted having an HEDT CPU would have so many cores you could just do x264 recording and use up all the threads, or even AV1 recording tbh... back to the original point, that's where there is a legitimate use for this, and you seem to think the only use for a card with a bunch of m.2 cards is only for risers... that's not what everyone needs or wants. You need to understand that everyone's needs can be different, and this card was designed primarily for m.2 SSDs in mind (because that's what the product pictures show).

TLDR: Want performance, get optanes, want storage, get hard drives, want a mix between, get this card.

When talking about Optane or 'max perf NVMe RAID': The use case / application defines just what "performance" means.

If you were running caching and/or 'big data' network infrastructure, Optane is king. Optane is generally considered 'fast but overpriced' (to the gamer / enthusiast) due to its best 'values' largely being "deep into diminishing return$". The the fast access time (between slow DRAM and the fastest NAND), high 4K perf, and its extreme write-endurance make it worthwhile for scientific application/AI-MI RnD, "Big Data" and large-scale network infastructure.
Proof: Literally why/how Intel even had a market for their purposefully-proprietary (and extremely limited in Xeon-platforms supported) Optane NVDIMMs.


For on/off-loading and editing many TBs of raw data/footage, the "serving suggestion" for this product is 'max performance'
21x of Samsung's newest Gen4 M.2 NVMe drives should do very well in sustained reads and writes, while allowing enough 'room'.

I'm a fan of Optane (to an unhealthy extreme, potentially) But:
Beyond 2-4 'cheaper' Optane drives in RAID0 (for Boot or 'Scratch') or used w/ ZFS, the real cost-benefit curve 'nosedives' for most Individuals' potential uses.
-Even the 'halo-tier edge-case end-(power)-users'... They can 'tier' storage if they need it. lest they'll be spending more on storage than they probably did on their house, etc.


I think I basically said what Berfs1 said, but a different way (and from the perspective of someone that knows more about Optane than he could ever hope to put to good use)

I'm also optane fan, of course I only have one without any raid or so, it's a shame this technology died, hopefully in the next 5 years or so, there's a new technology that surprasses it (unlikely, but who knows)