Build Your Own CFExpress Card

I came upon this interesting article for making your own reasonably priced CFExpress type B card. It sounds reasonable. Does it work? I do not know, but Tom's Hardware is usually a reliable site.

 

LINK: Adapter Turns SSDs Into Cheap CFExpress Cards | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)

I've used similar adapters to convert SSDs for use in some 1st generation digital cameras where the original batteries are rare to impossible to find. Worked fine.

 

Convert SSD's into batteries?

I think it would work but I am not sure how fast.

Convert SSD's into batteries?

of course I meant memory cards, not batteries, The latter are actually a more serious problem to find.

I can't imagine any component more important to be rugged and reliable than the memory card. I'll gladly pay for a card made and tested to be durable and reliable by the manufacturer rather than hack something together myself and risk losing my images.

I can imagine videographing all day and opening cfexpress b adapter, plugging hard drive to for example

Dell Precision 3240 Compact and enjoy data transfer rates.

And how many insertions will the SSD bare and exposed last before something breaks?

 

A CFExpress type B card is tested to withstand 10000 insertion cycles.

You only insert the SSD once, i think. After that, it is the CFexpress card thingy that gets inserted and ejected.

Until, of course, the Sintech adapter breaks, and you have to transfer the SSD to another one.

 

The storage technology of CFexpress and SSD seems similar. So the difference in price reflects the exclusivity of the CFexpress card form factor. Not the technology used.

You only insert the SSD once, i think. After that, it is the CFexpress card thingy that gets inserted and ejected.

 

Yes, but hapien suggested opening the adapter up and connecting the drive to laptop directly, if I understood correctly. "I can imagine videographing all day and opening cfexpress b adapter, plugging hard drive to for example "

 

The storage technology of CFexpress and SSD seems similar. So the difference in price reflects the exclusivity of the CFexpress card form factor. Not the technology used.

 

IMO it's the price to pay for the ruggedness and many insertion cycles.

 

In any case CFexpress type B cards are not proportionally more expensive than other cards considering the speed. Comparing with SSDs is not really fair since these are designed to be mounted basically only once during the lifetime of the product.

And how many insertions will the SSD bare and exposed last before something breaks?

 

I have to admit that idea was quite bad, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2 the connector on adapter and computer is rated for only 60 mating cycles

I have to admit that idea was quite bad, according to M.2 - Wikipedia the connector on adapter and computer is rated for only 60 mating cycles

Again, you only insert the M.2 SSD once. Into the adapter. It stays there.

Again, you only insert the M.2 SSD once. Into the adapter. It stays there.

 

Right, but the speed available via the CFexpress adapter, a card reader, and external bus may not be comparable to the speeds obtained with the same SSD inserted directly on the motherdrive. People might be surprised how much difference there is (my CFexpress cards are about as fast as they get but the transfer speeds via USD card reader of the card manufacturer are about 80% lower than when transferring between two internal m.2 SSD drives). If someone shoots e.g. 8K video in abundance, they'd probably want the transfer to computer optimized. I'm not really sure how close the transfer speeds get to the nominal speeds of the cards, in my case they're not close at all, but it's probably due to lack of suitably fast external bus interface that is compatible with the card reader. When purchasing or building a computer for photo and video editing, it is a good idea to test this. For me it doesn't really matter much as the transfer speeds (300-400MB/s on average, peaking much faster but only for a few seconds in the beginning of the transfer) are fast compared to what they were in the past (e.g. 90-120 MB/s for pre-XQD card types), and the rest of the speed to 1700 MB/s might not make that much of a difference with the quantities of data that I produce with my cameras. However, if I were to shoot 8K video this would indeed become an issue and I would need to optimize the computer for that. Fortunately I'm not that ambitious regarding video and think even 4K video is ridiculously good from the point of view of detail compared to what is needed for moving images.

In the future hi-resolution video may be needed for still images source material, programs like ffmpeg have option to extract still images from video, even to frame level.