ProGrade Digital officially announces 3rd generation 1TB CFexpress cards

It looks like last October’s post was a little premature. Despite appearing on the B&H website, it looks like ProGrade’s 3rd-generation 1TB CFexpress Type B cards hadn’t been officially announced by the company themselves. Well, now, they have.

ProGrade Digital has announced their newest 3rd-generation 1TB CFexpress Type B cards, boasting read speeds of up to 1,700MB/sec, burst write speeds up to 1,500MB/sec and sustained write speeds of up to 1,300MB/sec. But why the delay between listings appearing in October and an official announcement now? Well, ProGrade explains that, too.

ProGrade didn’t actually mention the fact that listings had started appearing a few months ago in their press release, but it does stress that they felt it important to write the sustained write speeds on every card alongside the max burst read speed. After all, if you’re using a camera that writes footage with a certain bitrate and a minimum card speed requirement, it’s essential information to know.

All new 3rd generation CFexpress Gold cards now clearly state the sustained write speed on the front label. This additional messaging clearly states the real-world capability of our cards – especially critical for high performance video capture applications.

The newest generation of ProGrade 1TB CFexpress Type B card utilises PCIe Gen 3 with an NVMe 1.3 host controller interface. This allows them to provide read speeds of up to 1,700MB/sec, burst write speeds of up to 1,500MB/sec and sustained read speeds of up to 1,300MB/sec for the 1TB card. Prograde founder and CEO Wes Brewer says this new large capacity card offers the “dramatically improved performance needed for a very broad range of video capture needs”.

Along with the 1TB card, ProGrade has announced a new 3rd-generation 512GB CFexpress Type B card. It boasts identical 1,700MB/sec and 1,500MB/sec max burst read and write speeds respectively, but the sustained write speed is a little slower at up to 800MB/sec. Still no slouch, but significantly slower than the 1TB Card.

The ProGrade Digital 3rd-gen 1TB CFexpress Type B card is available to pre-order now for $399. The ProGrade Digital 3rd-gen 512GB CFexpress Type B card is available to pre-order now for $179.99. The 512GB card begins shipping in February 2023, although no specific date has been mentioned for the 1TB card yet. Hopefully, it won’t be too much later than the 512GB card’s release.

There’s been no official mention so far of the 2TB card that popped up in October, although the label on the card for the B&H listing back then did specify a 1,300MB/sec sustained write speed, which fits with the capability of the newly announced 1TB card. So, maybe we’ll hear about that one soon.