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.

Sabrent USA was in a boastful mood yesterday, and proceeded to gloat on Twitter about an upcoming gargantuan storage solution: "At Sabrent, we run on the cutting edge of technology. Working with Apex, we received one of these new cards and currently running it through tests. We call this the Sabrent Apex X21 Destroyer. 21X 8 TB SSDs for 168 TB of storage on single card!" The company has revealed that it is collaborating with Apex Solutions on the single PCIe card offering, but the smattering of text and two photos uploaded to Twitter are just teaser material for the moment. There have been no reports of preview units getting sent to potential testers or hardware influencers. Sabrent and Apex will continue to tweak and evaluate.

The Destroyer is formed of already existing parts, namely Apex Solution's own x21 NVMe mounting platform card, and twenty-one of Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus SSD 8 TB NVMe 4.0 Gen 4 PCIe M.2 Internal SSD model (SB-RKT4P-8TB). A single Apex x21 card will set you back $2800, and the 8 TB Rocket 4 Plus SSD is currently discounted to $1099 (from $1499). That grand total comes to a whopping $25,879, and extra expenses are expected in the form of adequate cooling solutions and a hardware controller capable of managing that unruly gang of SSDs. Sabrent is expected to post updates about finalized fittings, features and exact pricing in the near future.