Nikon, SanDisk, Sony team on 500MBps CompactFlash cards
updated 07:40 am EST, Tue November 30, 2010
Nikon, SanDisk and Sony work on 500MB sec CF cards
Nikon, SanDisk and Sony today proposed a format to the CompactFlash Association that would dramatically increase the performance of CF cards. The revamp would switch from an internal Parallel ATA interface to PCI Express, giving as much as 500MB per second of headroom. It would be three times faster than the 167MB CF 6.0 spec finished just this month and still faster than the 375MB per second CFast standard, which uses SATA.
The format would allow for either longer continuous RAW shooting or enable it for larger resolutions; HD video cameras and non-camera devices could also use the faster storage. Computer transfers would also be faster, the group said. It would support more than 2TB of storage and would still have power saving methods to reduce the energy draw when full performance isn't necessary.
As the format is only now being proposed, neither the Association nor the companies involved have an estimate as to when they could expect the PCIe-based format to go live.
