Lexar CFexpress Type B 128GB Card Review

1. Introduction2. Lexar CFexpress Type B 128GB 3. ATTO/CrystalDiskMark/PCMark104. Real Life File Transfers5. Closing Thoughts6. View All Pages

Lexar's latest addition to their Professional product line is the CFexpress card range. The range consists of four capacities; 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB. Lexar's CFexpress card is Type B but there are also Type A and Type C specifications. All three have PCIe Gen 3 interfaces and support the NVMe 1.3 specification but differ in the number of PCIe lanes they support.

Type C cards are the fastest with four PCIe lanes (4,000MB/s bandwidth), then comes Type B with two lanes (2,000MB/s) and finally Type A using a single PCIe lane (1,000MB/s). The cards also differ in size with Type A being the smallest (20 x 28 x 2.8m), Type B is next (29.60 x 38.50 x 3.80 mm) while Type C measures in at 54 x 74 x 4.8mm.

Lexar quote performance figures for the drive of up to 1.740MB/s for reads and up to 1,000MB/s for writes. We couldn't reach the top read speed as the card reader Lexar kindly supplied with the drive only supports speeds up to 1,050MB/s. Using the ATTO benchmark we got a read result of 1,045MB/s but only 677MB/s for writes, well short of the official maximum. However, when tested with CrystalDiskMark 7 we could confirm the official write speed as the tested drive produced a write result of 1,012MB/s along with a read score of 1,066MB/s.

The CFexpress Type B card uses the same form factor and connections as XQD cards and indeed the Lexar card is backwards compatible with XQD supporting cameras, but only those that have had a firmware update to enable CFexpress support.

We found both the 128GB CFexpress Type B card and the Professional CFexpress USB 3.1 card reader on sale at Bristol Cameras. The 128GB CF Express Pro Type B card for £215.00 (inc VAT) HERE  and the card reader for £42.00 (inc VAT) HERE.

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Pros

• Very fast performance.
• Build quality.

Cons

• Not many devices (at the time of writing) support CFexpress.
• Pricy.

KitGuru says: At the time of writing, CFexpress are the fastest memory cards available, ideal for capturing 4K RAW video and very large resolution images. Because the technology is so new, the number of devices that support the format is limited.

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