Sabrent Rocket CFX CFExpress Type B Memory Card and Reader Review (512GB/1TB)

TEMPS, SUSTAINED WRITES AND TRUE DATA TESTING

TEMPERATURES

Two characteristics that became very important with the introduction of CFexpress as a mainstream storage medium were temperature and sustained write speeds.  We measure temperature by monitoring and updating a  Crystal DiskInfo Benchmark while a large 85GB 8K file transfer is being performed.  This is the extreme of what one might see in this environment.

An important aspect to remember is that the temperature results we obtain are the extreme.  They are the hottest the card got during any period of our testing which was constantly monitored.  It does not speak to the median or typical temperatures one might expect which would be around the low 30°C mark.  Having said that, the results we obtained from the Sabrent cards were very encouraging as they fell just behind the industry leading Prograde and Delkin cards.

SUSTAINED WRITE PERFORMANCE

We determine sustained write performance by transferring a 85GB 8K media folder from the PC to the CFexpress Type B card.  This test is vital to those looking at digital storage for high end 4K and 8K video recording.

SABRENT ROCKET CFX CFEXPRESS TYPE B 1TB MEMORY CARD

SABRENT ROCKET CFX 512GB CFEXPRESS TYPE B 512GB MEMORY CARD

This is the meat and gravy of this entire report… and these results were a bit surprising. Something we expected with the newest VPG400 accreditation was new cards being introduced that simply reached that spec, rather than some of the incredible sustained write performance we have today well above 1GB/s.  Considering this is Sabrent’s first generation CFExpress B cards and they have an incredible value, we anticipated the 463MB/s result from the 1TB card and it surpasses the VPG400 spec.   What we never expected, however, was the lower performance from the 512GB version of 326MB/s which was one of our lowest recorded to date as ca ne seen in this chart:

We subsequently established contact with Sabrent reps who acknowledged our results and added that they had done extensive testing on both cards on several of today’s latest and best cameras.

REAL WORLD FILE TRANSFER COMPARISON

For our Real World File Transfer Comparison of the world’s top CFexpress Type B cards, we have included all cards that we have received to date. This test is conducted through the transfer of data from one spot on the test drive to another to give us the truest of transfer speed results for that device.

It is important to note that, at least for the most part, this chart resembles the hierarchy of the Sustained Write Chart, however, it also merits a very important consideration which is that sustained writes are just that.  Sustained writes point specifically to camera operation for most, as that same card is typically removed and data transferred to ones PC by way of an external reader, many of which will achieve transfers at maximum speed of the card.