Pretec debuts CFast storage card, proclaims it world's smallest SATA SSD
By Donald Melanson 
posted Jan 9th 2009 2:08PM
posted Jan 9th 2009 2:08PM
Pretec has already pushed standard CompactFlash cards pretty far, and it now looks to be branching out beyond the confines of the format, with it today announcing its new CompactFlash-sized (but apparently not CompactFlash-compatibile) CFast storage card. Helping the card earn that title is its use of a high-speed SATA interface, which boosts the maximum transfer speed to a blistering 375MB per second, or roughly 300% faster than the speediest CompactFlash card on the market today. In a bit of a twist to these usual announcements, Pretec says the the first 32GB cards are actually available starting today (albeit not directly to consumers), with some 64GB card promised to be following "soon."
No Picture ???
:(
use your imagination, it looks like a CF card.
OK, but I can only imagine it with boobs
if it really looked like a CF card, it would probably work in a CF card reader and not have a SATA interface.
If it isn't CF compatiable then why is it a CF card? Or a CF sized card?
A dual interface CF card with a fast sata adaptor would be nice for people who do a lot of photography.
CFast is a terrible name though, whatever it is.
yes but only if it was compatible with cameras that accept CF cards. The line "not compact flash compatible" in the description makes me doubt the usefulness. I'm open to the possibility that is wrong and it's got 2 modes. Use it as a CF card with CF compatible devices and then an ability to attach to a SATA port where available for super fast xfers. There is a USB memory stick that does this very thing. It's USB on one end and eSATA on the other.
I wonder if all SSD's have the same lifetime and equally good algorithms to prevent overwriting the same area too much, if not then I'd like to know who's reliable and who's just boasting speed, I bet such a company would have a site consisting of too much (adobe-)flash content, or maybe not.
Engadget should require their writers to actually research something before writing...
1) First of all, nowhere it is mentioned that "CFast" is not a proprietary technology, but actually the next-gen CompactFlash *standard*.
2) I don't know where he got 375MB/sec, but "CFast", like the regular SATA standard used for HDD/SSDs (aka SATA/300) is limited to 300MB/sec. Perhaps he took the raw rate of 3.0Gps? SATA has 20% encoding overheard, so 3000Mbps turns into 300MBps.
3) Currently-existing high-speed CF cards can't do much over 40MB/sec, so they are not in need of this new SATA interface yet, although it will be nice for the future.
The card looks like a PCI slot on a motherboard with something seperating the 2 interfaces, around similar size to a compact flash card. You can see them on the Pretec website.