CompactFlash Association showing off CF card with SATA interface

Well, wouldn't you know it. Nearly half a year after we first heard that CompactFlash SATA cards were in the works, we're finally getting some confirmation. The CompactFlash Association will be showing off a CFast connector and package at CES 2008, and the SATA interface included will purportedly provide interface data rates up to 3Gb/sec -- quite a bit swifter than the 133MB/sec that PATA serves up now. According to Mr. Shigeto Kanda, the CFA chairman of the board, the "development of a CompactFlash card with a SATA interface" will enable CF to "maintain dominance in the non-consumer (embedded systems, single board computers, data recorder, etc.) markets" as well as in those fancy DSLRs / camcorders. Per usual, there's no word on when this stuff should make the leap from show floor to store shelf.

[Simón @ Jan 4th 2008 11:37AM]

From BuzzWizard over at Gizmodo:
"The speed is increasing, however it's not increasing from 133MB to 3 GigaBytes, but from 133MB to 3 Gigabits, which is effectively 375MB/sec. [www.unitconversion.org]
Still a nice increase in speed."

[Sam Winter @ Jan 5th 2008 12:48AM]

yes SATA/300 runs at 3.0Gbits/sec. However, because of the 8b/10b encoding scheme for error correction, it reduces the effective bandwidth to 300MB/sec. Still over 2x as fast as 133MB PATA

[Nick @ Jan 4th 2008 11:48AM]

Awesome, so when it comes time to upgrade my webserver again, I can toss a cf card into the SATA slot instead of the power sucking hard disk.

Energy efficient FTW.

[paragraph @ Jan 4th 2008 11:48AM]

This should be interesting, CF Speeds are one of the bottlenecks i can think of for DSLRs that really irks me. But a Throughput of 3gb/s should be enough for anyone right now ;)

[Jeff @ Jan 4th 2008 12:23PM]

CF speeds should not be a bottleneck on SLR's *unless* you are shooting continuously, shooting RAW and your camera is 10mp or more. And you're using a crappy CF card. Even still, on my camera, I can shoot 5-6 shots in a row before it'll start to bog down even with a $20 1GB CF card.

This is the main reason why DSLR's still use CF cards; not only are they durable, they also have the highest throughput of any standard. Also, with CF, the controller is on the card (one reason they're bigger than other types of flash memory), meaning you can buy a CF card based on its speed - your camera won't be the bottleneck. If CF is slow for you, just buy a faster card.

This news about SATA is going to affect solid state laptops and embedded devices a lot more than it will affect SLR's.

[ScareyJ @ Jan 4th 2008 1:37PM]

My digital SLR commonly gets bogged down for short delays, with a slightly less than 10MP and a decent 1GB CF card. The reason you're not experiencing it until 5 or 6 shots is probably because your camera, like mine, has a high speed cache between the imager and the CF card. You can burst, sending frames quickly to the cache which then get offloaded to the slower CF storage. When the smaller cache fills, you get delayed, and as it starts to clear/offload to CF, you can start snapping away again. With larger resolutions and faster capabilities, the problem will grow ... this should definitely help.

[Magallanes @ Jan 4th 2008 11:57AM]

OT :Ugly logo ever!.

[Kyran @ Jan 4th 2008 12:22PM]

One thing to keep in mind: Just because the interface is faster doesn't necessarily mean the speed of the flash memory they use will be faster.

I have yet to see a CF card that can come close to saturating the IDE interface it resides on.