CFast as Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2016-05-06
·
974 words · ~4 min read
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The Humble secure digital or SD card
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it's found its way into most of the digital cameras on the planet with their
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small size High capacities and relatively low cost it's pretty easy to
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see why virtually all point and shoot cameras any phones that have expandable
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storage and even many video cameras use
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SD for storage but SD is not always the
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right tool for the job and shooting super highres photos on a DSLR or
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recording 4K video that takes up tons of
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space requires flash memory with not just High capacities but also very high
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speeds and while premium models exist low-end SD cards leave a lot to be
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desired for high-end photo and video creative professionals but to understand
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the new developments we need to derail this whole video for a moment and go
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back to one of the earliest standards for camera memory compact flash if you
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owned a dig cam as we used to call them in the uh late 1990s or early 2000s
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there's a good chance that you remember those adorable rectangular Dees that
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were thicker bigger and faster but more
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expensive than SD but what you might not know is that although SD won the
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mainstream flash War compact flash never
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entirely disappeared which isn't to say that it's aged entirely gracefully
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either so when designing a high-end SD card butt kicker the powers that b
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borrowed but didn't entirely copy compact flash and gave us cast a
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standard that has been making its way into higher-end photographic equipment
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as the name implies cast's main advantage over SD and older compact
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flash cards is that it actually uses the same Serial ATA bus that your PC uses
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whereas original compact flash used a parallel ATA connection like the one in
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your grandpa's computer that means that c cards can perform data transfers at up
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to 600 megabytes per second just like a
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high-end SSD making them ideal for 4K video and other bandwidth heavy
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applications especially when you compare them to SD cards which currently top out
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at less than half of that speed the cfast interface itself has also become
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useful even if you don't want the cards because cfast uses the SATA bus it's
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compatible with SATA ssds which one enterprising Kickstarter used as the
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basic idea behind the c box an adapter that attaches to the cameras and
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camcorder slots and then holds two ssds
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connecting directly to seast so you can record 4K video directly to your SSD
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drives without having to worry about space constraints and the horrendous
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cost of the more compact flash memory
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cards but hold on a second lonus should I really be buying all of these seafast
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cards it sounds useful but what if it goes the way of betamax or the HD DVD
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good question there's currently a small but intense format war going on in the
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highend video scene between cfast and a
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competing standard called xqd which uses the even faster PCI Express Bus and
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Promises capacities of up to 2 terabytes on a single card and as if that weren't
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enough SD and micro SD cards refus to go
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gently into that good night with speed and capacity revisions showing up every
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few years oh and I guess there's SATA ssds themselves as well that even some
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cameras do use so no it isn't clear
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which of these rival formats are going to end up dominating high-end
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photography and video recording but at least whichever one wins we can sleep
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comfortably knowing that the camera on the end of our next Generation selfie
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stick is capturing every detail of our nose pores in glorious 4K glob Gro Gob
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and glob bless technology and bless Mass
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drop to mass drop is the site where you guys the community say hey we'd sure
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like to get like a great deal on whatever it happens to be uh what if we
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all pitched in to buy one could we get a discount and they go yeah they work
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directly with manufacturers and Distributors to arrange for what is
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essentially group buys and we've got a pretty interesting one here today it's
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the ultimate ears 18 Pro custom inar monitors these are different from your
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typical inar earphones basically you visit an
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audiologist for ear Impressions you ship those Impressions to mass drop then
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Ultimate Ears will manufacture what is essentially a tailormade pair of IMS
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just for you sure they're still expensive even with a bunch of people
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committing to buy them but you're going to get six balanced armature drivers two
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high two mid to low and thanks to the molded fit a whopping minus 26 DB of
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noise isolation and you can customize the covers on on them too so check out
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the link in the video description if you want to learn more about this particular
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drop and just to check out Mass drop in general because they've got a whack ton
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of cool stuff everything from like knives to keyboards to well high-end
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audio equipment just like this so I
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guess that's pretty much it guys like the video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it suck leave a comment if
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you have suggestions for future fast as possible just like this one and check
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out our Channel Super Fun Channel where we've actually got a pretty slick video
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that just went up I forget what it was
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right yeah rubber band machine gun check that out with the little ey in the top
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right corner I'm going to have a card there for you see you later