A little over a year ago, Nextorage released what was at the time, the world’s fastest CFexpress Type B memory cards. Now, they’ve targeted Sony, announcing the company’s fastest CFexpress Type A cards.

With speeds of up to 950MB/sec, they ride the limits of CFexpress 2.0 Type A card speeds. At the moment, though, they’re only available in Japan.

Nextorage CFexpress A1 Pro/A1 SE

There are seven new CFexpress Type A cards from Nextorage in all. Five of them call into the company’s more high-performance A1 Pro range. The other two are in the slower speed but higher capacity A1 SE lineup.

Nextorage A1 Pro

The Nextorage A1 Pro series cards offer maximum read and write speeds of 950MB/sec – with a minimum sustained write speed of 850MB/sec – in 640GB, 320GB, 160GB and 80GB capacities. The 40GB card offers a significantly slower maximum write speed of 600MB/sec and a minimum sustained write speed of 550MB/sec.

Nextlink A1 SE

The two cards in the Nextorage A1 SE series offer larger capacities of 960GB and 1,920GB. Both cards also offer up to 950MB/sec maximum read/write speeds but guarantee much slower minimum sustained write speeds. The 960GB card actually does quite well, guaranteeing a minimum sustained write speed of 700MB/sec (faster than the 40GB A1 Pro card).

The larger 1,920GB card, though, only guarantees 300MB/sec sustained write speeds. This isn’t really a massive issue right now. 300MB/sec is a 2,400Mbps bitrate. Even the Sony FX3 only outputs at a maximum of 1,200Mbps – well below the minimum guaranteed speed.

The new Type A speed kings?

These could very well be the fastest CFexpress Type A cards on the market right now. They even beat out Sony’s own CFexpress Type A cards by 150MB/sec on maximum read and by 250MB/sec on max write speed. In fact, the minimum guaranteed write speed on four of the cards is 150MB/sec faster than Sony’s maximum.

All five cards in the Nextorage A1 Pro lineup also sport the rare VP400 (400MB/sec) speed rating. This is a symbol we almost never see, probably due to the fact that most cameras still don’t need anything more than V200 (200MB/sec). V400 and V200 are essentially the CFexpress equivalents of the V90, V60, V30 speed ratings for SD cards.

The pair of Nextorage A1 SE cards offer V200 speeds. Again, though, this works out to 1,600Mbps, which is above the limits of even the FX3. I’m sure somebody will let me know in the comments if any Sony mirrorless cameras with CFe Type A slots shoot more than 1,600Mbps.

Price and Availability

At the moment, the new Nextorage cards only seem to be available in Japan. It’s currently unclear when or if they’ll spread throughout the rest of the world. I expect that the popular cards and capacities, at least, will eventually come to other countries.

Regarding price, here are the current prices in Japan and their US$ equivalents.

• Nextorage A1 Pro 640G – 79,800 yen ($558)
• Nextorage A1 Pro 320G – 49,800 yen ($348)
• Nextorage A1 Pro 160G – 29,800 yen ($208)
• Nextorage A1 Pro 80G – 16,900 yen ($118)
• Nextorage A1 Pro 40G – 11,900 yen ($83)
• Nextorage A1 SE 1920G – 99,800 yen ($698)
• Nextorage A1 SE 960G – 64,990 yen ($454)