14 DAY TRIAL // It wasn't all that long ago that Transcend unleashed its Class 10 and Class 4 SDHC Cards and the company is already making its next move on this market for highly compact storage solutions. What the outfit did just a short time ago was announce the availability of its newest collection of CompactFlash memory cards that seem to make a point of achieving as high a reliability rating as possible. They are called CF200I and have capacities of up to 16GB.
Flash memory has advantages over hard drive storage through its much higher speed and physical endurance. On the other hand, it loses out to the latter in terms of long-term survivability because it has a limited number of write cycles, which means its cells/bits will eventually become unusable. The biggest issue with this is that it is hard to tell when the card starts to suffer from this. Thus, when it created the CF200I. Transcend implemented the Flash Life Guard software, which reports when the flash cells reach the safety threshold for write/erase cycles.
As far as performance goes, the CF cards aren't to be frowned upon. They read at up to 40MB/s and write at up to 35MB/s. Also, they comply with the CompactFlash specification 4.1 and come with a full range of features meant to enhance data integrity and reliability. The list includes hardware ECC (Error Correction Code), SLC NAND Flash, the Early Retirement technology and even StaticDataRefresh. As for their industrial-grade endurance, the devices can withstands shocks of up to 1,500G, strong vibrations and even temperatures of -40°C to 85°C during operation.
Transcend's latest CF inventions have a MTBF of 1 million hours and capacities of 128MB, 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, 2GB,. 4GB, 8GB and 16GB. They are backed by a two-year warranty but, unfortunately, have not been given prices yet.