CFast Card

An industrial CFast card is a SATA III drive in a removable CompactFlash-sized shell — the format for machines that need field-swappable media but can’t tolerate the connector wear of a consumer memory card. Qootec builds CFast 2.0 cards from 64GB to 1TB with pSLC or TLC 3D NAND rated for 3,000 P/E cycles, up to 550/500 MB/s, -40°C to 85°C, 2,000,000 hours MTBF and a three-year warranty, in a 42.00 × 22.1 × 3.5 mm shell.

They are specified into CNC and machine-tool controllers, rugged data loggers, industrial video recorders and mobile mapping rigs. Would a consumer card do the job? Electrically, yes. In service, rarely — consumer cards are built for intermittent photographic use, not continuous write duty at 70°C. Ours are screened in the Shenzhen factory we have owned since 2014. Where capture rates exceed what SATA carries, move to the industrial CFexpress range; pSLC versus TLC covers the endurance trade-off and the full industrial SSD range lists the other form factors.