We've been hoping for a powerful storage hog (opens in new tab) to devour gigabytes for years, but maybe there is an answer. No, game developers are not making the game smaller. It's 21 M.2 SSDs on a single add-in card like this Apex Storage X21.

This massive add-in card has up to 168TB of high-speed storage (via Tom's Hardware (open in new tab)). By my very complicated calculations, that's enough space for 1,400 installations of Microsoft Flight Simulator, but you'll need 21 8TB SSDs; with Sabrent's Rocket 4 Plus 8TB drives, that comes to about $21,000! Yes - there may be a bulk discount or something.

But all speeds and feeds are listed: the Apex Storage X21 has sequential read speeds up to 30.5GB/s and sequential write speeds of 26.5GB/s. In terms of IOPS, that's 7.5M read and 6.2M write. While that's plenty fast enough for our modest gaming needs, this is clearly a kit for more datacenter-specific deployments.

Still, no one would argue that this product cannot be connected to a gaming PC. It wouldn't need to be equipped with the most expensive, $1,100-per-unit 8TB drives. Some of the best SSDs for gaming (open in new tab) are 1/4 the capacity and 1/10 the price.

Add-in cards work fine with Windows 10/11 and Linux, occupying only one PCIe 4.0 x16 slot on the machine. Cooling may be a factor to consider. There is a heat sink to cool the onboard processing, thus ensuring that the load is completely on the card and not on the CPU, but none of the drives are independently cooled. The add-in card has SSDs on four different planes for a total of 21 drives, so some drives appear to be sandwiched close together.

So add a large number of fans to your shopping list as well. All together, this is an expensive upgrade, but if PC gaming isn't overkill, what is?