How many M.2 drives is too many M.2 drives? That’s a question this Kickstarter project from Apex Storage (as noticed by Hackster) attempts to answer

Storage Scaler Crams 16 SSDs Into One Board

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2021-07-07 12:00:11

How many M.2 drives is too many M.2 drives? That’s a question this Kickstarter project from Apex Storage (as noticed by Hackster) attempts to answer: the Storage Scaler crams 16 SATA M.2 drives onto one PCIe board.

The crowdfunding campaign has 25 days to go as we write, and has reached about a sixth of its goal. What you get for your money, with the usual crowdfunding caveats applied, is a PCIe board with space for 16 M.2 sticks. These SATA drives then talk to the host PC through four SFF-8643 SATA connectors, for a total of 16 6Gbps connections. Power comes from the x4 PCIe slot the card rests in, along with a six-pin feed from the PSU of the type often used to power graphics cards. 

It requires an external SATA HBA or RAID card to work, as it has no built-in drive controller. In RAID mode, it offers up to 7,377 MB/s read and 5,712 MB/s write. In HBA mode it can be configured as software RAID, JBOD, or as individual drives through OS disk management. 

Potential applications include high-res video editing, storage caching, and mining storage-based cryptocurrencies such as Chia. By using SATA rather than NVME drives, the hope is to keep costs down and increase returns.

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