OWC announces the small CFexpress Type A cards with 1.8 GB/s speed

OWC has introduced the particularly fast Atlas Pro memory card series. The CFExpress cards use the small Type A format and already support the CFexpress 4.0 protocol, which was announced in August 2023. The cards can read at around 1.8 GByte/s. When writing, it is around 1.7 GByte/s. They also offer a VGP200 certificate (at least 200 MByte/s writing), which is important for Sony cameras.

According to the data sheet, however, they are faster and offer 400 MByte/s as a minimum for writing.

As Type A cards only offer one PCIe lane, these cards are slower than Type B cards with two lanes or even the large Type C cards with four lanes. However, OWC's speed specification is already close to the theoretical maximum of 2 GByte/s and also significantly exceeds the speed announced by Sandisk's new SD Express cards announced at the NAB Show.

Due to their small size (20 mm x 28 mm x 2.8 mm), Type A cards can compete with SD cards, as they take up similarly less space. This is important for smaller cameras, for example.

However, OWC also offers an adapter so that the cards can be used in Type B readers, for example. With that said, the cards cannot then use the double number of lanes to achieve higher performance in older Type B devices, for example.

OWC will launch the Type A cards with two capacities: 480 and 960 GB. The specified performance data is identical. The cards can already be pre-ordered in the USA and cost around 320 and 520 US dollars respectively.