Lexar is touting 600x (90MB/s) guaranteed minimum sustained write speed on its new top-of-the-line Compact Flash cards and an ExpressCard reader that'll write at up to 866x (133MB/s) for the current crop of UDMA 6 enabled cameras, including many of the high end video SLRs from Canon and Nikon.
Last month, there was a small wave of 600x Compact Flash cards announced, and now Lexar joins the warp speed party with their Lexar Professional 600x UDMA 6 cards in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB capacities.
It seems like not that long ago that the original batch of UDMA cards with speeds up to 300x were announced. And these cards are still blazingly fast: A 300x CF card paired with a FireWire 800 UDMA card reader will dump 2 gigabytes of data to your harddrive in under a minute. But these new UDMA 6 cards and readers threaten to make the original UDMA cards seem downright sluggish by comparison.
Why the need for even more speed?
Simple: Faster cards in UDMA 6 enable cameras such as the Canon EOS 7D, Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Nikon D3x, and Nikon D300s can capture and write more data (be it big RAW stills or HD video) before hanging up with a buffer bottleneck. And the more data written to a card, the more data that needs to be transferred to the computer. We're sure Rob Galbraith will have full speed reports of these cards and reader posted in the very near future.
And it is also very interesting to note that the new Lexar Professional ExpressCard Reader announced today in conjunction with the 600x cards touts a top transfer speed of 886x (133MB/s), a good bit faster these cards. We reckon we'll be seeing UDMA 6 Compact Flash cards rated to match this 866x reader speed within the next 18 months.
How fast is 866x? That's 2 gigabytes of data transferred in just about 15 seconds. In other words, that's a full 8GB card transferring to your computer in just over a minute.
Full details at Lexar.
