Transcend has released successor to the Compact Flash format the CFast, that remains favored for use in high-end digital cameras. The new format significantly boosts data throughput from 90MB/sec in to 375MB/sec by integrating a SATA interface into the existing CF form factor. For professional photographers, the higher transfer speed could mean shooting photos that require multiple shot sequences to taken without creating the potential for a memory buffer overload.

While the new cards come in consumer friendly capacities of 2GB, 4GB, 8GB and 16GB, the current range is aimed a industrial applications. Also, as might be expected, the move from the IDE interface to the SATA interface means that although the new flash cards have the same form factor as current, they are not backwards compatible.

The next generation of consumer compact flash cards will feature the CF5.0 specification which uses 48 bit addressing to boost the current limitation of 137GB up to a massive 144PB.