If you buy a new Sony camera, chances are that it will accept CFExpress Type A memory cards in addition to normal SD cards.
CFexpress Type A is a new, fast memory card standard that is currently used exclusively by Sony. The other major memory card manufacturers prefer to use CFExpress Type B memory cards.
To help this standard get off the ground, Sony was the first to bring its own memory cards onto the market, the Sony TOUGH CEA-G Series.
These memory cards are said to achieve up to 800 MB/s and are comparatively expensive.
There are now several other manufacturers with CFexpress Type A memory cards, but Sony remains the “standard choice” for many.
However, the Sony CFexpress Type A memory cards have one big problem, heat! More on this in this article.
What are CFexpress Type A memory cards?
CFexpress memory cards are more than just “faster SD” memory cards. So they essentially rely on a completely different technology.
CFExpress Type A, B and C memory cards are essentially PCIe NVME SSDs, just in a different housing.
For example, there are suitable adapters from 2230 SSDs to CFexpress Type B memory cards. CFExpress Type A memory cards are of course a lot smaller and therefore more special.
This SSD basis has various advantages, both in terms of speed and data security. With CFexpress memory cards, smart data can be read out and the status of the memory cards can be read out.
However, SSDs have one major disadvantage: heat generation.
4x CFexpress Type A memory cards in comparison
So far I have had CFExpress Type A memory cards from 4 different manufacturers in my hands.
Sony TOUGH CEA-G Series R800/W700 CFexpress Type A 160GB Lexar Professional GOLD R900/W800 CFexpress Type A 160GB PERGEAR Professional 260GB CFexpress Type A Memory Card ProGrade Digital CFexpress™ 2.0 Type A Memory Card (160 GB)
When it comes to performance, these four models are all quite close to each other. I was able to determine the following values on a PC with CrystalDiskMark. These are the “maximum” values.
The ProGrade and Sony CFexpress Type A memory cards tend to be pretty identical. The PerGear is a touch slower and the Lexar is a touch faster.
The bottom line is that the four memory cards don’t do much.
This has also been confirmed for me in practice. Here only the PerGear felt a bit slower when taking continuous photos, but even with a Sony A1 the differences were small.
80 degrees and hotter
CFExpress Type A memory cards get hot, really hot, under constant load! The Sony CEA-G160T easily reached 81 degrees under load for me.
This high temperature causes the memory card to throttle. Although it achieves quite good peak values, things look pretty bleak under constant load.
Here you can see the write rate of the various CFexpress memory cards when I copy approx. 130GB onto them.
Here you can see that the write rate of the Sony memory card drops very quickly and then sometimes drops to below 100 MB/s.
This, while the memory cards from Lexar and PerGear offer practically the same performance and write the 130GB in 1/4 of the time.
In this video you can see how the temperature and write rate of the memory cards behave.
This behavior occurs more strongly if, for example, the Sony card reader (which is made of metal) is already somewhat “preheated” because, for example, you have read several memory cards beforehand.
Yes, this throttling can also occur when reading. However, here in the test it was significantly weaker.
Here, too, you can observe a slight throttling of the Sony memory card, while the Lexar and PerGear models remain stable.
In practice, I was able to observe significantly lower values when reading out the Sony memory card.
But what about the ProGrade? ProGrade and Sony are +- identical on this point. The ProGrade tends to take a little longer to warm up, but then shows the same behavior as the Sony.
Conclusion
As far as reliability is concerned, I can’t say anything negative about the Sony CFexpress Type A memory cards yet. However, in practice these were clearly a lot slower for me than they should be.
This is simply due to their high heat generation. Sony memory cards slow down extremely under constant load! And yes, I also noticed this sometimes in the camera, with very long continuous photo series.
In short, I would not buy the original Sony CFexpress Type A memory cards again at the moment, especially not at the extremely high prices that Sony charges.
The Lexar Professional GOLD CFexpress Type A memory card was just as reliable for me in both the Sony A7R V and the Sony A1 and offered absolutely consistent performance, which even exceeds the Sony’s maximum.
The Lexar is even cheaper than the Sony. In short, I would recommend the Lexar or maybe even the PerGear memory card over the Sony model.