Pretec 133X Compact Flash card
By Thomas Ricker 
posted February 27th 2006 7:00AM
posted February 27th 2006 7:00AM
Pretec is showing off
what they're calling the “world’s fastest” CompactFlash card. The 133X CF card is capable of running at up to 20MB/sec and 14MB/sec for read &
write access making it 50% faster than it’s predecessor; the PRETEC 80X. Yeah, ok Pretec but Sandisk has
been pulling 20MB/sec read/write speeds for awhile now with their Extreme III CF lineup. Anyway, The 133X CF is fully
ATA/True IDE compatible and operational in both 5V and 3.3V platforms. No pricing has been announced but expect this
professional card to come with a professional price tag.
[Via MobileMag]
Its constructed with 65 nano-meter 16Gb SLC NAND technology, which is typically one order of magnitude better reliability and 200%-500% faster than MLC NAND
That is almost an HD there! I wonder if it heats up? My latest USB Pen drive, at 1 gig, already gets pretty warm from use.
May I ask, you say an order of mag. more reliable. Was reliability a major problem in the past with flash media?
Just bought over here in Europe on Amazon 2GB SD card for 90. If the 4GB CF card would cost more than 2*90 - I doubt it would make any sense to professionals. Pros or amateurs both can counts. And in my experience, pros on average count better than amateurs. /me is amateur.
The X stands for '7'...it's a 1337 CF card in disguise!!
I had a Pretec 2GB SD Card that corrupted its file system on the first load. Pretec's customer service was horibble. FF--- HORRIBLE SELLER WOULD NOT DO BUSINESS AGAIN.
"Just bought over here in Europe on Amazon 2GB SD card for 90. If the 4GB CF card would cost more than 2*90 - I doubt it would make any sense to professionals."
Except that professionals don't use SD. So yes, a CF card makes sense for professionals.
The thing about CF, and the reason why professionals use it, is that the controller is in the card, not in the camera or whatever device you're using. This means that a) any CF card should be compatible with any CF device, and b) a faster CF card will be faster in any CF device, no matter how old it is. This is not true of SD devices, which have the controller on the opposite end (in the camera, or whatever).
So CF will always make the most sense for pros, and you can never have a card that's too fast. I've got a Sandisk Ultra II, and it's still not fast enough for me (when you're taking 8 megapixel RAW images, you're talking a lot of data to transfer).