You might think of Compact Flash (CF) cards as a commodity, and it’s mostly true, except for the very high-end where the Sandisk Extreme Pro sits. Aimed at the professionals (and enthusiast) photographers, the “Extreme Pro” series can read and write twice as fast as the previous generation of Sandisk Extreme CFs. We’re talking about a peak rate of 90MB/s versus 45MB/s. Sandisk has achieved this by using a new memory controller that can read/write twice as much data. It works like a RAID0 dual-SSD setup, but inside a flash card. Note that to get the maximum speed out the card with a computer, you will need to use Sandisk’s ExpressCard adapter as USB or even Firewire won’t be (effectively) as fast.
Who needs this type of performance? Professionals who have already spent a fortune on their cameras might, but if you shoot in burst mode and stall your memory card, or if you don’t want to wait 30s longer to download some pictures, you might want to jump on that boat. Yes, we know… it’s “Extreme”.
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