Nov 1, 2010 10:12 GMT  ·  By

While the new SDXC card is specifically intended for digital cameras and camcorders, the new CFast 500 cards that Transcend has prepared are, instead, designed for the industrial sector, being built in such a way as to operate on the same principle as solid state drives (SSDs).

While there are many types of memory cards for the consumer market, there exist also such cards that are designed for other things.

In this instance, the new CFast cards from Transcend are aimed at a variety of industrial applications, industrial PCs for the most part.

Mostly, the newcomers will be used in systems and devices that benefit from the compact size, the same size as that of regular CF cards (42.8mm x 36.4mm x 3.3mm).

The other major advantage is that, instead of the ATA/IDE interface, they boast the faster SATA connection, which lets them run at up to 108 MB/s.

Basically, they should be able to act as replacements for the significantly bulkier solid state drives and will show up in SATA 3Gb/s compatible devices, acting as removable high-speed storage.

As the company's announcement states, “they will be able to store and access information at faster rates as a result of the enhanced communication between the card and its host device.”

No only that, but their high speed and portability supposedly make them excellent for use as bootable drives.

Other assets worthy of note are the StaticDataRefresh and EarlyRetirement technologies, which prolong the lifespan of the Flash memory cells while also correcting data errors and ensuring data reliability.

Transcend prepared, so far, four CFast 500 models, with capacities of 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB and 16 GB, respectively.

All of them should show up in stores sooner or later, but the company did not actually offer any sort of exact information on pricing and availability.