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CF Express Type B cards have had the fortune of enhanced visibility as of late, their performance becoming the sweet spot for many new digital and video cameras that can take advantage of their data transfer speeds. Before the newest Type B version, most enthusiasts had never even imagined transfer cards faster than that of a SD card that could reach 300MB/s, a speed many thought was right up there. Today’s typical CFexpress Type B card has a read speed more than 5x of that at 1700MB/s. Such is the case with the newest Transcend CFexpress 820 Type B Memory Card released recently, with data transfer speeds of 1700MB/s read and up to 1300MB/s write.
The Transcend 820 is available in 256GB and 512GB capacities, utilizes the NVMe PCIe 3.0 x 2 host controller interface, and has different performance specifications depending on capacity. While the 256GB version we are testing today is capable of 1700MB/s read and 1300MB/s write, the 512GB version drops its write performance down just a bit to 1000MB/s.
The CFexpress 820 comes with a 5-year warranty and a quick check of Amazon shows pricing at $233.82 for thre 256GB card and $311.94 for the 512GB at the time of this report.
For our report today, we will be testing the Transcend CFexpress 820 Type B Memory Card with Transcends newest RDE2 USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 20Gbps CFexpress Type B Memory Card Reader shown in this picture above. We reported on it here. It is worthy of note that this device earned our Editor’s Choice Award as it is the first USB 3.2 2×2 20Gbps CFexpress Type B reader available on the market today. Prior to this release, one had to pay a premium for a ThunderBolt 3 reader in order to achieve equal data transfer rates.
It is also important to understand that, to achieve top CFexpress Type B performance of 1700MB/s as is the case of this Transcend 820, your USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 reader (or Thunderbolt 3) must be plugged into a system that is capable of USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 speeds. In our case, our newest Intel 11th Gen i9-11900K Test Bench contains the ASUS Maximus XIII Hero motherboard which has both Thunderbolt 4 and USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 integrated.
Free to the user of Transcend flash products is Transcends own SSD Scope toolbox which can be downloaded free of charge by clicking on the title above, This is fully compatible with the Transcend 820.
SSD Scope includes a host of utilities to include PC Info that can be seen here:
As well, it has its very own benchmark program which can provide performance variables for Transcend SSDs. The Transcend CFexpress 820 performs a bit better than listed specs here::
