Today we are looking at two new products by Prograde: a 480GB CFexpress Type A memory card and a CFexpress Type A memory card reader, both supporting the new and fast CFexpress 4.0 specification.
Background
The CompactFlash Association (CFA) announced the 4.0 specifications in August 2023 with the first products released around mid-2024. According to the new specs both the Type A and B CFexpress 4.0 cards have double the throughput of the previous generation with 2 GB/s and 4 GB/s respectively.
This leap in performance was achieved by utilizing the new CFexpress 4.0 which uses the PCI Express (PCIe) Gen4 bus and NVM Express (NVMe) 1.4c logical interface.
All these theoretical numbers are very impressive on paper but for us, the real question is can they actually impact our workflow in any way.
The new CFexpress A car and reader from Prograde
Testing
At the time of writing this review, there are no cameras on the market that support the CFexpress 4.0 protocol so we did not expect any significant improvements in read or write speed in camera.
To test this, we performed a quick test with our Sony A1 (firmware 2.02) and compared the original Sony CF-A 160GB card to the new Prograde card shooting a burst of 10s at HI+ resulting in 235 images and 237 images respectively, demonstrating that there is no real benefit to the new card on the A1.
As we expected the only relevant test at the moment is going to be when the new card is connected to a computer via a CFexpress 4.0 reader using a Thunderbolt 3 / 4 or USB 4 cable to a supported port and this is the main test that we performed in this review.
- Note. We were having some issues with reconnecting the Prograde reader after we disconnected it (using the Eject function in Windows). We are trying to figure this one out with Prograde and update the review if we have any new info.
The new CFexpress A 4.0 reader from Prograde – using USB4
Computer file transfer
We used the new Prograde card reader on our main computer, an Intel 13900K PC with 2 WD 850X and a Samsung 990 drives connected to a TB4 port on the MSI MEG Z790 ACE motherboard.
The first test was a simple synthetic test using Crystal Disk Mark 8.0.5. The results were very revealing:
- Sony 160GB CFexpress A (Delking CF-A reader) – 368MB/s read / 394MB/s write.
- Prograde 480GB CFexpress A 4.0 (@Prograde CF-A 4/0 reader) – 836MB/s read / 808MB/s write.
The second test was a real-world transfer test, copying 92.6GB to and from the card to the PC with the following results:
- Sony 160GB CFexpress A (Delking CF-A reader) – 317MB/s read / 283MB/s write.
- Prograde 480GB CFexpress A 4.0 (@Prograde CF-A 4/0 reader) – 683MB/s read / 524MB/s write.
- Note: As impressive as these numbers are (both the synthetic and certainly the real-world numbers that we got) they are far, far away from the official Prograde numbers of 1800MBs/1700MBs read and write speed. This discrepancy appears to exist in our test of the original Sony CF-A card with the Delkin reader and we are not sure if it has something to do with our PC or something else. Regardless, the new Prograde is still 2X faster than the Sony card/reader.
Conclusion
The new CF-A 4.0 card and reader from prograde are indeed twice as fast as the existing CFexpress A cards/readers. This is certainly impressive but it is important to realize that as of August 2024 this will do nothing to increase the capabilities of your Sony cameras and the only advantage that you will get is in read (and write) speed to your computer, as long as your computer supports Thunderbolt 3/4 or USB4 and you use the new card reader with the supplied cable.
Fast – but only for data transfer to your computer
Pricing
Talking about pricing, the 480GB version of the card sells for $390 while the 960GB sells for $600. The ProGrade Digital CFexpress Type A USB 4.0 Single-Slot Card Reader sells for $100.
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Iddo Genuth 
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