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The latest addition to Lexar's Professional range of memory cards is the CFexpress Type B card using PCIe Gen 3 and NVMe 1.3 protocols for fast transfer rates. Priced at £215, the cost per gigabyte is certainly high, but is the performance worth it for professional users?
Designed to meet the high-quality and seamless RAW 4K video capture needs of the next generation of DSLRs and cinema cameras, the Lexar Professional CFexpress Type B card supports both PCIe Gen 3 and NVMe 1.3 protocols to reach very fast transfer rates. Lexar quote performance figures for the card as up to 1,750MB/s for reads and up to 1,000MB/s for writes.
At the time of writing, four capacities make up the Lexar CFexpress Type B range, 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB.
Lexar back the card with a lifetime limited warranty.
The CFexpress Type B card comes in a box far bigger than the card, with an image of the card on the front. Under the image are symbols for CFexpress Type B and RAW 4K. At the bottom end of the front panel are the speed ratings for the drive; up to 1,750MB/s transfer and up to 1,000MB/s writes. The tab at the top of the box displays the drive's capacity.
The rear of the box sees these speed ratings repeated at the top, while making up the bulk of the text on the box rear are multilingual descriptions of the drives ability to capture high-quality images and RAW 4K video. There's also a logo displaying the lifetime warranty the card is backed by.
The drive has an aluminium chassis and measures 29.60 x 38.50 x 3.80 mm, the same as an XQD card and weighs in at 7.65g.
To help test the card, Lexar kindly provided us with another one of their recent introductions, the Professional CFexpress USB 3.1 card reader. The compact new reader has been designed to work with CFexpress Type B cards and supports read/write speeds of up to 1,050MB/s using a USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface.
Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V7.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.
Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
The PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark has been designed to test drives that are used for storing files rather than applications. You can also use this test with NAS drives, USB sticks, memory cards, and other external storage devices.
The Data Drive Benchmark uses 3 traces, running 3 passes with each trace.
Trace 1. Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, in to the target drive (write test).
Trace 2. Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test).
Trace 3. Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test).
Lexar quote read speeds for the drive of up to 1,750MB/s but as the Professional CFexpress USB 3.1 card reader only supports speeds of up to 1,050MB/s we couldn't get to that maximum figure. The best read scores we saw were 1,045MB/s in ATTO and a slightly faster 1,066MB/s in CrystalDiskMark 7.
The official write performance figure is up to 1,000MB/s. Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn't get close to that figure at 677MB/s. However, when tested with CrystalDiskMark's Sequential default test we saw a figure of 1,012MB/s, confirming the official performance figure.
To test real-life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.
10GB Photo folder – (304 files – 171 @ .RAW, 105 @ JPG, 21 @ .CR2, 5 @ .DNG).
5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo.
21GB 8K Movie demos – (11 demos)
16GB 4K Raw Movie Clips – (9 MP4V files).
The Lexar CFexpress Type B dealt with our real-life file transfers without any problems. The card show consistent performance for both read and write transfers, averaging 520MB/s for reads and 459.8MB/s for writes.
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.
