A few months ago Exascend announced its brand-new Essential CFexpress Type A series that are available in capacities up to 240 GB. The Essential CFexpress Type A 240GB card is among the larger-capacity Type As on the market, allowing for extended recording time on Sony a1, a7S III, A7 IV, A7V, FX30, FX3, and FX6.
Up until recently, the highest capacity CFexpress Type A cards on the market were limited to 160GB in capacity. However, Sony recently released 320GB and 640GB cards.
In some ways, CFexpress Type A is a strange format because there are limitations to the capacities that can be made, and only a handful of cameras, which are all made by Sony, use this type of media.
Key features
- 120GB, 180GB, and 240GB capacities
- Read up to 800 MB/s; write up to 700 MB/s
- Handles 8K RAW at 60 FPS
- New proprietary SmartStream technology: a disruptive technology that dynamically scales CPU frequency and performance to cater to the use cases, maximizing energy efficiency
- Exascend’s trademark Adaptive Thermal Control technology: ensures stable performance in thermally demanding environments
- SuperCruise technology: a sustained performance-enhancing algorithm that allows the CFexpress card to handle critical memory tasks while still offering stable performance
- Five-year global warranty
The Exascend Essential CFexpress Type A cards are available in capacities of 120GB, 180GB, and 240GB.
The new Exascend CFexpress Type A cards not only feature the same technologies found in their CFexpress Type B cards, but also some new ones. These technologies are claimed to ensure unwavering storage performance, extreme reliability and impeccable data integrity.
The CFexpress Type A cards come with Exascend’s trademark Adaptive Thermal Control technology, an advanced technology for managing thermals and ensuring stable performance in thermally demanding environments. Because of CFexpress Type A memory cards’ minuscule size and high performance, Adaptive Thermal Control is a cornerstone technology for unlocking the power of CFexpress in such a tiny form factor.
The new cards also feature Exascend’s brand-new SmartStream technology, a disruptive technology that dynamically scales CPU frequency and performance to cater to the use cases, making SmartStream perfect for maximizing power performance for the CFexpress Type A.
Finally, there’s Exascend’s patented SuperCruise technology, a sustained performance-enhancing algorithm that allows the CFexpress card to handle critical memory tasks in a manner that leaves stable performance unaffected.
What is interesting is that Exascend states that the card can handle 8K RAW at 60 FPS. As far as I am aware there are no cameras on the market that use CFexpress Type A cards that can record 8K RAW, maybe Exascend knows something we don’t!
Fast Speeds
The Exascend 240GB Essential CFexpress -Type A Card can support all the recording modes in any of the cameras that use the media.
They have claimed read speeds of 800MB/s and write speeds of up to 700MB/s. This allows them to be able to record 8K RAW at up to 60fps. The sustained write speeds of the cards are claimed to be 550 MB/s.
So how do these speeds compare to the Sony 320GB CFexpress Type A TOUGH?
| READ SPEED | WRITE SPEED | |
| Exascend 240GB Essential | 800MB/s | 700MB/s |
| Sony 320GB CFexpress Type A TOUGH | 800MB/s | 700MB/s |
What you clearly need to be aware of is that these listed speeds are largely irrelevant in the real world and you are not going to see maximum read or write speeds. The most important speed to try and find out is sustained read and write speeds which are generally a lot lower than maximum speeds. Unfortunately, some manufacturers don’t quote sustained speeds.
So what are the minimum sustained speeds of the cards? Well, below you can see the ones that I was able to find information about.
| MINIMUM SUSTAINED READ SPEED | MINIMUM SUSTAINED WRITE SPEED | |
| Exascend 240GB Essential | Not Listed | 550MB/s |
| Sony 320GB CFexpress Type A TOUGH | Not listed | Not listed |
Please note that this is the minimum guaranteed write speed and it is not necessarily as high as what you will get in the real world.
Capacity
CFexpress Type A cards have limited capacities. There are only currently three cards on the market that have a capacity of over 160GB. You would think that with more cameras coming to market that are recording in higher resolutions and higher bitrates, the need for larger capacity cards would increase. It is no surprise that Sony has the two largest card capacities available given the fact that they make all the cameras that support the media.
Record 8K
The Exascend 240GB Essential card is easily capable of recording 8K and 4K high frame rate material from the Sony a1 and Sony a7V.
Above you can see the recording data rates listed by Sony for the a1.
Above you can see the recording data rates for the Sony FX6. Again, the Exascend card can easily handle all of these requirements without breaking a sweat.
Fast Media Offload
What you clearly need to remember, and this goes for any type of media, is that transfer speeds will vary depending on both the read and write speeds of your card, your card reader, your computer, and what type of hard drive you are transferring to.
If you are using a CFexpress Type A card and transferring to an HDD drive, you won’t be getting fast transfer speeds. If you are transferring to a very fast SSD/NVMe then you will see lightning-fast offload speeds.
Real World speed tests
I did a few tests to see what the sustained read/write speeds of the Exascend 240GB Essential were. For the test, I was using a Mac Studio and an Exascend TCFexpress Type A card reader.
Above you can see the results for the Exascend 240GB Essential card with the stress set to 5GB. I got a sustained write speed of 540.1MB/s and a sustained read speed of 658.3MB/s. These were very good results, and the sustained write speed was just below the advertised speed of 550MB/s.
I also tested the Exascend 240GB Essential card using the AJA System Test Lite software under a 4GB load to see what the read and write speeds were. The card performed well in this test, but again, the sustained write speed was below the claimed figure of 550MB/s.
I also did another test to see how many frames per second the Exascend 240GB Essential card could handle recording 4K DCI ProRes 422HQ. The card could sustain 113fps.
The results I obtained during all of these tests clearly show that the card is easily capable of recording 8K 29.98p H.265/XAVC HS 4:2:2 10-Bit. The maximum data rate when recording 8K 29.98p on the Sony a1 is 520 Mb/s. It can also easily handle 8K 25p from the new Sony a7V.
Price & availability
The cards are now available to order for the following prices:
How does the price compare to the competition?
| PRICE | |
| Exascend 240GB Essential | $399.99 USD |
| Sony 320GB CFexpress Type A TOUGH | $649.95 USD |
The Exascend 240GB Essential is the only 2490GB card on the market and the only real competition is from the Sony 320GB CFexpress Type A TOUGH.
The Sony 320GB CFexpress Type A TOUGH costs $2.03 USD per GB, while the Exascend 240GB Essential costs $1.66 USD per GB.
Conclusion
If you own any of the Sony cameras that utilize CFexpress Type A cards, then the Exascend 240GB Essential CFexpress Type A offers a good balance of capacity and performance, while representing good value for money. It has good sustained read and write speeds and the card can handle anything you can throw at it without breaking a sweat.
The card worked flawlessly in all of the cameras I tried it with.
Price & Availability
The cards are now available to order for the following prices:
- 120GB $189.99 USD
- 180GB $299.99 USD
- 240GB $399.99 USD
