Exascend Archon

Yes, Exascend Archon CFexpress is a RED-approved CFexpress card. You can view an updated list of cards compatible with RED V-RAPTOR on RED’s website.

The Exascend Archon CFexpress card handles 8K RAW on RED V-RAPTOR without any risk of frame drops. The Exascend Archon CFexpress card also supports video formats up to 12K RAW and all photography formats available, including high-resolution burst photography.

Exascend Archon CFexpress combines high storage capacity and high endurance in a single card. It can be fully written to twice a day, every day for five years. Because of its high endurance and reliability, it comes with a worldwide five-year warranty.

There are many differences between Exascend Archon CFexpress and other CFexpress cards on the market. Here are some of the more important differences:

• Exascend Archon CFexpress is designed using mission critical-grade components and manufacturing processes – for extreme reliability and endurance.
• It features an industrial-grade PCIe Gen4 controller and premium NAND flash – for flawless operation in rugged environments and future-proofing.
• It is equipped with DRAM – for extreme performance, durability and performance consistency.
• It is boosted by Exascend’s exclusive performance and reliability-enhancing technologies.
• It comes with a five-year warranty – for extra peace of mind.
• Exascend’s best-in-class factory data recovery service is available in case of accidental deletions and hardware damage.

Exascend technologies such as Adaptive Thermal Control™ and RAID ECC enhance memory card reliability and mitigate the risk of data corruption. Our SuperCruise™ and enterprise-class latency optimization technologies boost sustained performance and improve responsiveness. Originally designed for mission critical and enterprise applications, these technologies raise the bar for performance and reliability in cinematography applications.

And it’s much more than just a theoretical difference. This is what performance looks like over time with Exascend Archon CFexpress compared to other premium CFexpress cards:

Our proprietary RAID engine brings a 1,000% improvement in reliability, enterprise-class firmware lowers response times by over 100% and mission-critical-grade components directly improve reliability and endurance. Higher endurance and reliability mean that Exascend CFexpress cards last longer, can be written to more times and perform better overall.

We designed the Exascend Archon CFexpress to offer a perfect balance between capacity, performance and reliability. That makes it a reliable companion for any type of shoot and any type of cinematography professional.

Moreover, Exascend Archon CFexpress’ extreme reliability and unique thermal design make it a perfect choice for high-budget studio productions and shoots in challenging environments.

Modern cinematography systems and video formats demand extreme performance and their tough workloads take a real toll on consumer-grade components, thus negatively affecting reliability and endurance. We combine our expertise from the enterprise and mission critical sectors to overcome this challenge and deliver memory cards that you can trust with your cinematography for the long haul.

Our CFexpress cards are designed, engineered, and manufactured 100% in-house by our global team spread across locations in the United States, Europe and Asia. That includes the card firmware, which is developed in-house by our world-class R&D team. In other words, we don’t rely on turn-key solutions or simply assembling off-the-shelf components – we create uniquely capable products through full control of every variable that makes our products great.

Exascend’s five-year global warranty covers any issues with the card. In case of accidents, including accidental formatting and destroyed cards, our deep-level factory data recovery service has extremely high recovery success rate even in cases with severe data corruption and damage.

Exascend Archon CFexpress uses premium TLC NAND flash from our partners at Micron and Kioxia.

Exascend Archon CFexpress uses premium TLC NAND flash configured as such. It is not configured to run in pSLC mode as some other premium cards on the market do.

pSLC is a workaround that allows lower-performing TLC NAND flash to operate at a higher level of performance and endurance than it otherwise could. The tradeoff is that pSLC reconfigures how the memory card uses the card’s NAND flash, resulting in a lower total storage capacity than the hardware could theoretically allow. For example, a 512 GB SSD that runs in pSLC mode would only make around 160 GB – a third of its theoretical capacity – available to the user. In normal TLC mode, the full 512 GB would be user-accessible.

Since the hardware is identical and due to current NAND flash memory density, it is simply not possible to fit enough NAND flash on a CFexpress card to reach capacities of 2 TB and higher while running in pSLC mode.

Exascend Archon CFexpress does not use pSLC mode because we were able to meet our performance and endurance goals without this workaround. The result is that we can offer customers an excellent balance between performance, endurance, capacity and price without forcing customers to choose between one or the other.