Compact Flash is a type of flash card or memory card originally designed for use in digital cameras for storing photographs. The photographs would be transferred from camera to a computer by either using the camera manufacturer's software and supplied cable, such as a USB or Firewire cable, or by removing the compact flash card (sometimes referred to as a CF card) from the digital camera and placing it in a reader connected to a computer. Some computers and laptops have a built in slot for accepting compact flash cards.
The compact flash card would then be accessible on the computer as an additional drive enabling the photographs to be copied from the card for later use, such as editing, printing or sending by email.
Now compact flash cards are used in other devices such as video recorders and industrial equipment, and as bootable hard drives, but they are not very popular in small devices like MP3 players due to their size. In fact at 43mm by 36mm and 3.3mm thick they are probably the largest flash media currently available.
The compact flash card was first produced in 1994 by SanDisk.
There are two types of Compact Flash card, Type I and Type II. Type I is 3.3mm thick and Type II is 5mm thick. Type II is used by Microdrives and other devices. You can read about Microdrives on Wikipedia by clicking here.
The compactflash card was the first flash card to compete with the earlier and larger PC card (PCMCIA) Type I memory cards and is probably the most successful flash media formats doing particularly well in professional digital cameras due to its cost effectiveness and large capacity availability, its large size (in comparison to other formats such as SD and xD) is not a problem in professional digital cameras as these are often bulky devices anyway and hence its market share in the digital camera memory market remains high.
NOR-based flash has lower density than newer NAND-based systems, and compact flash is therefore the largest of the three memory card formats that came out in the early 1990s, the other two being Miniature Card and SmartMedia. However, CF did switch to NAND type memory later on.
The memory card formats that came out in the late 1990s to the early 2000s such as SD, MMC, xD and various Memory Stick formats were stiff competition to the compact flash card. These new formats were quite a lot smaller and went onto dominate the memory card market for PDAs, mobile phones, MP3 players and compact cameras. However compact flash remains popular due to its cost and capacity as mentioned earlier and hence has outlived Miniature Card and SmartMedia. SmartMedia did offer heavy competition to CF in smaller devices, and was more popular than CF at its peak in terms of market penetration, but SmartMedia could not keep up with increasing capacities that are now up to 32 Gigabytes.
Compact Flash memory can only perform a limited number of erase/write cycles before a particular "sector" can no longer be written to. Memory specifications generally allow 10,000 to 1,000,000 write cycles. Typically the controller in a compact flash card attempts to prevent premature wear out of a sector by mapping the writes to various other sectors in the card, this is called wear leveling.
Compact Flash has an interface which is smaller than but electrically identical to the ATA interface. Hence it appears to the host device as if it were a hard disk of some defined size and has a tiny IDE controller onboard the CF memory device itself.
A CF memory card is a non-volatile and solid state device, and thus is more robust than a disk drive, and consumes around 5% of the power required by small disk drives and yet still has good transfer speeds (up to 40 MB/s write and 40 MB/s read for the SanDisk Extreme IV). Card speed is often specified in times ratings, i.e. 8x, 20x, 133x..., (the same system as used for CD-ROM's) where the number in front of 'x' when multiplied by 150kB/s gives the speed of the card (for example, 20x = 3.0MB/s). They operate at 3.3 volts or 5 volts, and can be swapped from system to system. CF cards are able to cope with extremely rapid changes in temperature. Industrial versions of the cf memorycard can operate at a range of -45 to +85 °C.
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Where can you buy Compact Flash cards from?
Contact us about Compact Flash cards and this website.
Fujifilm Standard Compact Flash card N074910A
Fujifilm Standard CF card N074920A
Fujifilm Standard CF card N074930A
Fujifilm Standard CF card N076710A
Fujifilm Standard CF card N076720A
Fujifilm Fast CF card N077390A
Fujifilm Fast CF card N077400A
Fujifilm Fast CF card N077810A
Integral Standard Compact Flash card CAM-CF512-IPRO
Integral Standard CF card CAM-CF1GB-IPRO
Integral Standard CF card CAM-CF2GB-IPRO
Integral Standard CF card CAM-CF4GB-IPRO
Integral Standard CF card CAM-CF8GB-IPRO
Integral Fast CF card CAM-CF1GB-IPRO100X
Integral Fast CF card CAM-CF2GB-IPRO100X
Integral Fast CF card CAM-CF4GB-IPRO100X
Integral Fast CF card CAM-CF8GB-IPRO80X
Kingston Standard Compact Flash card CF/512
Kingston Standard CF card CF/1024
Kingston Standard CF card CF/2GB
Kingston Standard CF card CF/4GB
Kingston Elite Pro CF card CF/512-S
Kingston Elite Pro CF card CF/1GB-S
Kingston Elite Pro CF card CF/2GB-S
Kingston Elite Pro CF card CF/4GB-S
Kingston Elite Pro CF card CF/8GB-S
Kingston Ultimate 133x CF card CF/1GB-U
Kingston Ultimate 133x CF card CF/2GB-U
Kingston Ultimate 133x CF card CF/4GB-U
Kingston Ultimate 133x CF card CF/8GB-U
Kingston Ultimate 266x CF card CF/2GB-U2
Kingston Ultimate 266x CF card CF/4GB-U2
Kingston Ultimate 266x CF card CF/8GB-U2
Lexar Premium Compact Flash card CF512-80-666
Lexar Premium CF card CF1GB-80-666
Lexar Premium CF card CF2GB-80-666
Lexar Professional CF card CF512-80-638
Lexar Professional CF card CF2GB-80-638
Lexar Pro WriteAssist CF card CF1GB-133-386
Lexar Pro WriteAssist CF card CF2GB-133-386
Lexar Pro WriteAssist CF card CF4GB-133-386
Lexar Pro WriteAssist CF card CF8GB-133-386
Lexar Pro UDMA 300x CF card CF2GB-300-386
Lexar Pro UDMA 300x CF card CF4GB-300-386
Lexar Pro UDMA 300x CF card CF8GB-300-386
Lexar Pro UDMA 300x Reader CF card CF2GB-300-386R
Lexar Pro UDMA 300x Reader CF card CF4GB-300-386R
Lexar Pro UDMA 300x Reader CF card CF8GB-300-386R
PNY Standard Compact Flash card P-CF512-BX
PNY Standard CF card P-CF1GB-BX
PNY Optima CF card P-CF1GBS4-BX
PNY Optima CF card P-CF2GBHS4-BX
PNY Optima CF card P-CA4GBHS4-BX
SanDisk Shoot and Store Compact Flash card SDCFS-128-E98
SanDisk Shoot and Store CF card SDCFS-256-E98
SanDisk Standard CF card SDCFB-1024-E10
SanDisk Standard CF card SDCFB-2048-E10
SanDisk Standard CF card SDCFB-4096-E10
SanDisk Ultra II CF card SDCFH-512-902
SanDisk Ultra II CF card SDCFH-1024-902
SanDisk Ultra II CF card SDCFH-2048-902
SanDisk Ultra II CF card SDCFH-4096-902
SanDisk Ultra II CF card SDCFH-8192-902
SanDisk Extreme III CF card SDCFX3-1024-902
SanDisk Extreme III CF card SDCFX3-2048-902
SanDisk Extreme III CF card SDCFX3-4096-902
SanDisk Extreme III CF card SDCFX3-8192-902
SanDisk Extreme III CF card SDCFX3-12288-902
SanDisk Extreme III CF card SDCFX3-16384-902
SanDisk Extreme IV CF card SDCFX4-2048-902
SanDisk Extreme IV CF card SDCFX4-4096-902
SanDisk Extreme IV CF card SDCFX4-8192-902
SanDisk Extreme IV Reader CF card SDCFRX4-2048-902
SanDisk Extreme IV Reader CF card SDCFRX4-4096-902
Sony Standard Compact Flash card NCFB1G
Sony Standard CF card NCFB2G
Sony Standard CF card NCFB4G
Sony High Speed CF card NCFC2G
Sony High Speed CF card NCFC4G
Transcend Standard 75x Compact Flash card TS2GCF75
Transcend Standard 75x CF card TS4GCF75
Transcend Standard 75x CF card TS8GCF75
Transcend Standard 80x CF card TS512MCF80
Transcend Standard 80x CF card TS1GCF80
Transcend Standard 80x CF card TS4GCF80
Transcend Fast 120x CF card TS1GCF120
Transcend Fast 120x CF card TS2GCF120
Transcend Fast 120x CF card TS4GCF120
Transcend Fast 120x CF card TS8GBCF120
Transcend Fast 133x CF card TS2GBCF133
Transcend Fast 133x CF card TS4GBCF133
Transcend Fast 133x CF card TS8GBCF133
Transcend Fast 133x CF card TS16GCF133
Transcend Ultimate 266x CF card TS2GCF266
Transcend Ultimate 266x CF card TS4GCF266
Transcend Ultimate 266x CF card TS8GBCF266
You can buy any of the above cards (and more) from www.allmemorycards.co.uk