# Review Angelbird avpro series Cfast and sdxc-uhcII cards



## cinema-dslr (Dec 5, 2017)

Wrote this review on dvxuser which i like to share here too:

AV professionals are rather conservative about changing memory card brands and rather stick with the known and trusted brands like sandisk , lexar,sony,panasonic.
This reputation does mean that you'll have to pay for the privilege and the price/GB remains rather high compared to mainstream ssd prices.
There are plenty of lower to low cost brands with similar performance but historically sometimes sacrificed reliability/customer-support to get to this lower price.

When you're getting paid for your work it can get you in a place of being penny wise but pound foolish if your card fails and you loose future work because you opted for a “ cheap ” card.
This does mean that the big company's can keep the prices high and innovation as low as possible.
Evidence of this profit/innovation can be found today in that “lowercost” company's are able to bring out higher and faster spec cards to the market at lower prices.
For the bigname brands the memory card division is just a small part of their total business and don't really have a close connection with their client base .

Bring on the dedicated market brands!
On this forum a US based company like Egodisk gets some good press and seems dedicated to cfast & sdxc cards.
It is great to have company's that are close to their intended markets .

Now I like to talk about a European company called Angelbird located in Austria
They have been making dedicated storage related products for the Pro AV market since 2010.
First PCIe based raid solutions and ssd's , later portable ssd's and for some time now cfast & sdxc cards.

I came upon this company in search of a high capacity cfast card for my C200.
512Gb for 1hour of footage seemed like a card to get and only a few company's sell these with Lexar milking the market for its worth.
Egodisk has a 512GB card for a more friendly price but not readily available in Europe.
And then there was the anouncement from angelbird during IBC in Amsterdam.
At a similar pricepoint and with a good reputation it peaked my interest.

As soon as I inquired about availability and pricing a message was posted in this forum that their 512GB card didn't work with the C200.
Folowing-up on my inquiry I linked to the posted message and waited for a response which came quick .
They had contacted the poster and were resolving his issue ,on my offer to help with my C200 to resolve any issues with their cards ,they responded that they were more than willing to send their entire collection of memory cards to me for testing (try to get that response from Lexar/Sandisk etc..)

So here we go:

I received a C200 match pack containing 2 sdxc128GB cards and a Cfast 256GB card.
And further a Cfast 128GB and 512GB card.
Build quality of the cfastcards is really good they feel solid with lots of metal.

For bench marking my pc is windows 10 pro 64x,i7 2600K at 4,7Ghz internal sandisk extreme 470GB
and USB 3,1 connection for cardreader.

But first: in camera testing.
Method: format in camera ,fill-up card in one take,check material,format in camera, fill-up card with multiple takes,check material, rinse and repeat .

All the cards worked without fail with one small exception, the 512GB card would sometimes not get recognized by the camera??
power-cycling the camera would fix this and then the card functions normally even when removed and reinserted again.
Others have reported this same issue with the Egodisk 512GB card which leads Angelbird to conclude that it's more a camera/ex-fat problem than card problem since this card doesn't exhibit this issue in other camera's which often utilize a different format method be it ntfs or hfs+
Hopefully its a bug that can be rectified with a firmware update from Canon.


Their sdxc uhII cards also performed first-class and are fast enough to record Canon rawlite if that would have been possible.
They are way beyond what is necessary for the C200 mp4 but you do get really fast transfer times.


After testing them for there intended use I put them thru Hdtune pro to test large file read/write speed.

AVpro 128GB Read 496MB/s Write 299MB/s.......AVpro 256GB Read 494MB/s Write 377MB/s






AVpro 512GB Read 493MB/s Write 420MB/s...... SDXC 128GB Read 253MB/s Write 220MB/s


First with a Sandisk cfast reader which I got bundled with one of my xc10's.
It's plastic and usb3.0 and works but doesn't get the most out of the cards.
So the nice people of Angelbird were kind enough to send me their soon to be released double cfast reader, which is USB 3,1 and full metal design “very mac like” and just like their portable ssd has a sunken USB c connector to prevent easy disconnection from the reader.


With their reader I could get the max out of the card resulting in faster transfer times.

The reader comes with software for several utilities (recover disks ,secure erase etc..) now only for mac, later-on for windows.

Another simple addition on their card reader is the ability to put the card reader in read only mode via a switch located next to the USB connection.
This makes handing over your material to a DIT on set kind of idiot proof and accidental wiping the card less likely .

I am still contemplating about whether to go old school betacam time and change 256GB cards every 30min or going for the larger 512GB cards and the ability to shoot 68min on 1 card.
I probably go for a couple of the 256GB cards first.
Communication with Angelbird was a pleasure, really helpful contact and totally committed to give the best support with detailed to the point answers to your questions.
I'm more than happy to trust my footage to their storage solutions.


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## Click (Dec 5, 2017)

Thank you for sharing this information.


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