At one time I was seriously considering the Blackmagic URSA Mini and decide not to go that route for few reasons with one of them being the cost of Cfast cards. I just ran into an article that was very informative concerning the future of Cfast and wanted to share it with you. Below are some excerpts from an article titled "THE CFAST VS XQD BATTLE IS ALREADY OVER: STOP BUYING CFAST" and at the end is a link to the complete article.
"XQD is going to be the winner here for a number of reasons, but the most basic one is at the core of the two products: the type of interface. XQD is PCIe, while CFAST is SATA.
PCIe is a more “scaleable” type of interface, while SATA was never really designed to be scaleable at all. SATA has one definition and is capped at 600 MB/s speeds. This is not a “theoretical” cap, this is a true cap. It can’t go faster. As you can see, this is problematic since the requirements for speed and efficiency on the side of cameras in the last two years has gone well beyond SD, and with 6K and 8K just around the corner in consumer devices, there is just no way that 600 MB/s is going to be enough.
But on PCIe you can add what are known as “lanes” and therefore it can scale. You can’t do that on SATA, it’s just not part of how the interface is built.
The Advent of CFexpress, XQD Compatibility, and Why You Should Stop Buying CFAST
On September 7, 2016 the CFA decided that competing standards was not the way of the future, and likely realized that their continued majority support for CFAST over XQD was not a winning strategy in the long run.
Rather than allow the two competing standards to drive up the price of memory, the CFA and its members developed a new type of memory: CFexpress. The best part? Because it’s PCIe and because PCIe is backwards compatible, XQD will continue to work on CFexpress cameras… and, theoretically, any camera produced to work with CFexpress will work with any XQD card currently on the market.
Which means that buying CFAST is a dead-end decision. Buying XQD? That’s actually future proof."
http://resourcemagonline.com/2016/1...ttle-is-already-over-stop-buying-cfast/68002/
"XQD is going to be the winner here for a number of reasons, but the most basic one is at the core of the two products: the type of interface. XQD is PCIe, while CFAST is SATA.
PCIe is a more “scaleable” type of interface, while SATA was never really designed to be scaleable at all. SATA has one definition and is capped at 600 MB/s speeds. This is not a “theoretical” cap, this is a true cap. It can’t go faster. As you can see, this is problematic since the requirements for speed and efficiency on the side of cameras in the last two years has gone well beyond SD, and with 6K and 8K just around the corner in consumer devices, there is just no way that 600 MB/s is going to be enough.
But on PCIe you can add what are known as “lanes” and therefore it can scale. You can’t do that on SATA, it’s just not part of how the interface is built.
The Advent of CFexpress, XQD Compatibility, and Why You Should Stop Buying CFAST
On September 7, 2016 the CFA decided that competing standards was not the way of the future, and likely realized that their continued majority support for CFAST over XQD was not a winning strategy in the long run.
Rather than allow the two competing standards to drive up the price of memory, the CFA and its members developed a new type of memory: CFexpress. The best part? Because it’s PCIe and because PCIe is backwards compatible, XQD will continue to work on CFexpress cameras… and, theoretically, any camera produced to work with CFexpress will work with any XQD card currently on the market.
Which means that buying CFAST is a dead-end decision. Buying XQD? That’s actually future proof."
http://resourcemagonline.com/2016/1...ttle-is-already-over-stop-buying-cfast/68002/
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