Sabrents New Apex X16 Rocket 5 Destroyer in Testing, Benchmark Numbers Included

[Nomad76]

You may have heard about Apex's new storage solution called the X21, we wrote about it a while ago. If not, let us remind you that is a huge single expansion card that can hold up to 21 M.2 solid-state drives (SSDs), which is incredible. Apex has also made x16 versions of this card, and it is currently in the late testing stage. The back side of the Apex X16 has 8 M.2 slots, giving it a total of 16 M.2 slots. Although these two cards are impressive with their unmatched speed and capacity, Apex is not stopping there.

Today, we are showing some early pictures and benchmark numbers of the Sabrent Apex X16 Rocket 5 Destroyer. As you can see, this new 5th generation (Gen 5) card from Apex holds 16 of Sabrent's Rocket 5 4 TB SSDs. This gives it a maximum capacity of 64 TB using the fastest Gen 5 SSDs on the market. The expansion card uses a single PCIe Gen 5 x16 slot, which leaves plenty of space for other cards or even another X16 card. Multiple X16 cards can be combined, or it can be paired with other Apex series cards like the Sabrent Apex X21 Destroyer, for a total of 168 TB of incredible 4th generation (Gen 4) speeds. The Sabrent Apex X16 Rocket 5 AIC can reach amazing speeds of 56 GiB/s Seq Reads and 54 GiB/s Seq Writes. For 4K Random IOPS, it can reach 20 million 4K Reads and 19 million Write IOPS. The Sabrent Apex X16 Rocket 5 will be available to order soon.



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[bonehead123]

Looks cool but:

A) Can you boot from the card(s)
B) Can you run the "Can it run Crysis" app from them, heeheehee

If the answers to these questions is yes, then I may just have to get one (or 167.58- for the office !)

If the answers are no, then m.E.h, y/A/w/N, & s*N*o*O*z*E*...

 

[Noci]

16 of the fastest NVM PCIe 5.0 SSD's , that will be quite an expensive heater inside any system I recon.

Probably a wet dream for the extreme data-horder, but I cannot see a user case for the regular PC user/Gamer (unless you want to be the fastest on the world to load your game ).

I assume this product is targeted at professionals without a shabby budget .

 

[TheLostSwede]

Right... This card is going to cost a fortune, as the Microchip switch goes for almost €700 a pop...

https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/PM50084B1-FEI?qs=2wMNvWM5ZX4GYVaxoG1I4g%3D%3D

Even if Sabrent pays half the Mouser pricing, this is going to be an expensive product.

 

[L'Eliminateur]

Right... This card is going to cost a fortune, as the Microchip switch goes for almost €700 a pop...

https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/PM50084B1-FEI?qs=2wMNvWM5ZX4GYVaxoG1I4g%3D%3D

Even if Sabrent pays half the Mouser pricing, this is going to be an expensive product.

These kind of boards are not for consumers, these are things that you either need or don't, and if you need it falls into "boss, order X of this board..." and the price is irrelevant.

It's also pretty much a dumb pcie switch, so there's no raid no overlay or namespaces or anything, it's just straight drives showing as individual drives.

 

[TheLostSwede]

These kind of boards are not for consumers, these are things that you either need or don't, and if you need it falls into "boss, order X of this board..." and the price is irrelevant.

It's also pretty much a dumb pcie switch, so there's no raid no overlay or namespaces or anything, it's just straight drives showing as individual drives.

I don't disagree, I simply pointed out the price of the PCIe 5.0 switch, since I knew they were going to be pricey and I hadn't actually had a look at what they were selling for. Last time I looked them up, there was no public pricing.

 

[LabRat 891]

I like PCIe Switches and I cannot lie

Right... This card is going to cost a fortune, as the Microchip switch goes for almost €700 a pop...

https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Microchip-Technology/PM50084B1-FEI?qs=2wMNvWM5ZX4GYVaxoG1I4g%3D%3D

Even if Sabrent pays half the Mouser pricing, this is going to be an expensive product.

IMHO, Gen5 devices are entirely in the realm of 'only a value, when used to make money'.
ie, "Professional- and Industry-use only" products.
16x Gen5 NVMEs over a Gen5x16 uplink is 'big data' and '16K RAW video' territory (I'd assume).


OToH even, Gen4 switches are still spendy. I'd adore an 'affordable' ASmedia Gen4 M.2 Expander card.
I'm on a Gen3 ASM2824-based QM2-4P-384 w/ 4x 2TB Solidigm P41 Plus drives for my 'applications, games, and storage' needs, @TM.

 

[Courier 6]

Crapola! that would cost a lot to populate all the slots...

 

[TechLurker]

This would be fun to put in a bunch of 3DXpoint drives and just see how fast it can rip. In all seriousness though, if it has built-in bifurcation, that'd make it a tempting buy second-hand in the future.

 

[JWNoctis]

Could see this live in a server in some datacenter, and serve whole seasons of 4K video content with another half a dozen DPUs with 100Gbps network. Amazing.

 

[A Computer Guy]

Without power loss protection I'll consider less expensive choices but it's still neat and I wouldn't mind having one.

 

[Minus Infinity]

Can it beat Optane in Random reads/writes though?

 

[A Computer Guy]

16 of the fastest NVM PCIe 5.0 SSD's , that will be quite an expensive heater inside any system I recon.

This is where water cooling NVMe makes more sense.

 

[LabRat 891]

Without power loss protection I'll consider less expensive choices but it's still neat and I wouldn't mind having one.

That's typically an expected feature in this field.
I wonder if they expect to offer a +12V 6-pin BBU? Only real power input I see on the card (other than from PCIe slot)

Can it beat Optane in Random reads/writes though?

In VROC RAID 0, probably.

Alternatively...

This would be fun to put in a bunch of 3DXpoint drives and just see how fast it can rip. In all seriousness though, if it has built-in bifurcation, that'd make it a tempting buy second-hand in the future.

While Intel isn't producing Gen4 M.2 form factor Optane drives, and it'd be insanely expensive...
I'd bet there's at least 1 company out there using high-performance Gen4 switch(es) (or dedicated EPYC platforms) and Gen4 P5800s (or better). The Random throughput would be too worthwhile, for certain applications.

This is where water cooling NVMe makes more sense.

Agreed.

 

[L'Eliminateur]

Can it beat Optane in Random reads/writes though?

not likely.
Random r/w is still as slow as the slowest drive, nothing whatsoever can beat optane in latency for that

 

[ypsylon]

Those cards are really puzzling. Given how ludicrous and inefficient is making and cooling of high capacity M.2s. 8TB price is ludicrous. You can easily achieve same or even better effect with simple 4x4 bifurcated PCIe adapter and getting 4x15.36/30.72/61.44 TB 2.5" U.3 drives.

No switches, if adapter fails you get another one which is like 50$, no need to worry how to cool that mountain of M.2s because in normal operation U.2/3 devices simply cannot overheat - enclosure is giant radiator.

In a way it may be worthwhile effort to test the card with M.2-to-SFF-8639 adapters plugged in as a sort of primitive HBA and connect 16x30.72TB drives. That's density boys and girls.