There are two main subdivisions of CF cards, 3.3 mm-thick type I and 5 mm-thick type II (CF2). Ī 16-GB CompactFlash card installed in a 2.5" IDE port with adapter The XQD card format was officially announced by the CompactFlash Association in December 2011. With potential read and write speeds of 1 Gbit/s (125 MB/s) and storage capabilities beyond 2 TiB, the new format is aimed at high-definition camcorders and high-resolution digital cameras, but the new cards are not backward compatible with either CompactFlash or CFast.
The new format has a similar form factor to CF/CFast but is based on the PCI Express interface instead of Parallel ATA or Serial ATA. In November 2010, SanDisk, Sony and Nikon presented a next generation card format to the CompactFlash Association. CFast (also known as CompactFast) is based on the Serial ATA interface. Traditional CompactFlash cards use the Parallel ATA interface, but in 2008, a variant of CompactFlash, CFast was announced. the Canon EOS R5, Canon EOS R3, and Nikon Z 9 use CFExpress cards for the higher performance required to record 8K video. As of 2022, both Canon and Nikon newest high end cameras, e.g.
Proprietary memory card formats for use in professional audio and video, such as P2 and SxS, are faster, but physically larger and more costly.ĬompactFlash's popularity is declining as CFExpress is taking over. Most of these cards are smaller than CompactFlash while offering comparable capacity and speed. Subsequent formats, such as MMC/ SD, various Memory Stick formats, and xD-Picture Card offered stiff competition. ĬompactFlash became one of the most successful of the early memory card formats, surpassing Miniature Card and SmartMedia. The format was specified and the devices were first manufactured by SanDisk in 1994.
If you want your Mac to be able to write to this partition, you'll need third-party software to enable this on Mac OS X.Digital cameras and other mass storage devicesĬompactFlash ( CF) is a flash memory mass storage device used mainly in portable electronic devices.
This would be a good volume to install Windows onto, but beware that Mac OS X only has read-only support for NTFS built-in. If you want the drive to have a volume that's more optimal for Windows than FAT, give it an NTFS partition as well.
The FAT volume format is showing its age, but a huge variety of OSes know how to work with it.
This is a good place to put files that you want both Mac and Windows to have read/write access to. Give the drive one FAT32 (MS-DOS) partition, which both Mac OS X and Windows can read and write.This volume format accommodates Mac OS X and Mac files the best. Give the drive one HFS+J (Mac OS Extended, Journaled) partition large enough to install Mac OS X onto (10GB+).Also avoid Apple Partition Map, which Windows machines would have no clue about. Avoid Master Boot Record, which Intel Macs can't boot from. Reformat the drive, using the GUID Partition Table (GPT) as the low-level partition table format.If you want something that both machines / OSes can read a write, and that can act as an emergency boot drive for either machine, do this: Using additional software like this will probably create a performance hit, but how noticeable it is depends on your usage pattern. You should choose the filesystem that you plan on using most frequently so that it is as fast as possible and then reformat the disk accordingly. On the Mac, this can be accomplished using add-ons related to the MacFuse project.
Look at additional software which will allow for either NTFS or HFS+ to be read on OS X and Windows respectively. This could be used to move data between the Mac and the Windows machine, but would suffer from all the same FAT32 issues mentioned above.
In addition to limitation to file sizes < 4 GB, you also lose a lot of nice features on HFS+ such as permissions and journalling.Ĭreate a FAT32 partition on the disk along side the existing HFS+ partition. Reformat the disk to FAT32, which ( as suggested by Michael Sturm) is the lowest common denominator in file systems between OS X and Windows. This file system type is not natively supported by Windows, which is why the disk will not mount when you plug it into your laptop. If it is Mac OS Extended or a something similar then your disk is using the HFS+ file system, which is the default for OS X. the name you see in your file tree when the disk mounts under OS X) what do you see for the Format at the bottom of the window? If you open the Disk Utility application on your Mac with the disk connected, you should be able to see it in the list of disks on the left hand column of the Disk Utility window.