Lexar Pro 3600x & 3500x

3600x & 3500X - Introduction It is probably the worst kept secret in the camera industry, but both Nikon and Canon will be releasing their next generation flagship cameras early next year, and by the middle of the year release new mid-grade cameras as well. Equally well known is that most of these new cameras will use CFast 2.0 instead of CompactFlash for their storage medium. Mix in 4K video cameras becoming rather reasonably priced and the future of semi-professional grade video storage is also CFast 2.0. Lexar is fully aware of these facts and in a concerted effort to be able to meet upcoming demands have released two brand new lines. The 3500X and the 3600X. The former is the replacement for the 3400X series (yes this makes the 3500X a second generation CFast 2.0 model) and its intended market is the semi-pro and professional photographer. The latter on the other hand has been optimized for ARRI video cameras and meant for sustained usage loads. Both models will come in sizes ranging from moderate to massive, both will have lifetime warranties and both will be bloody fast. So with not one, not two, but potentially three models (3400x) to choose from consumers who have not been paying close attention are going to be a bit confused on which model is ‘best’ for their needs. Today we will be showing what the strengths and weaknesses of these three models are so that you the consumer can decide which is best for your needs – instead of simply rely on ‘higher is better’ numbering. 3600x & 3500x - Specifications and Features 3600x & 3500x - What is CFAST 2.0 and why should you care As we said in the past, very few consumers actually care about the format their 'card' comes in and this is a shame. CompactFlash, SD, XQD, and CFAST, all have different strengths and weakness. Some are faster than others, some are more portable, and some are cheaper. So it really is in your best interest to do some research before purchasing one over the other - this is especially true of cameras that support multiple formats. Also as we stated in the Lexar 1066X Compact Flash review, the CompactFlash Association (CFA) were not overly worried about creating a standard that would last multiple decades . Instead they wanted a cheap, easy, and trustworthy new form-factor that could compete against Sony, and the other half dozen competing standards at that time. Sadly, they chose to use PCMCIA and PATA as the standards they would co-opt into their CompactFlash standard. This is why even back in 1998 the CFA talked about replacing CompactFlash with a newer standard. This new standard was based on Serial ATA and was eventually released to market under the moniker 'CFast' - as in CompactFlash Fast. In fact, CFast drives are nothing more than slightly modified Solid State Drives in that they use a micro-SATA data and power connectors. The upside to this decision is the CFA could easily and quickly modify CFAST to take advantage of newer and faster SATA standards. The downside is that CFAST 1.0 was basically limited to 3Gb/sec - via SATA rev II standard. Actually, the be more precise that was the theoretical performance limit, and in reality most CFast 1.0 cards (for example the Atomos CFast 1.0 64GB card) ran at 200MB/s read and about 80MB/s write. This certainly was faster than the CompactFlash cards of the day could do but CFast is not backwards compatible with CompactFlash equipped cameras or CompactFlash cards. At that time camera RAW files sizes were rather small and the idea of having 50, 60, or 75MB RAW files was simply ludicrous. As such CFast was seen as more trouble than its worth by Nikon, Canon, Sony, and all the other camera manufactures - CompactFlash was still 'good enough'. Instead a handful of video cameras opted for it, but that was about the extent of market penetration. Fast forward to 2014 and CFAST 2.0 is unleashed upon on a radically changed marketplace. Massive mega-pixel cameras are now a 'thing', 12+ frames per second cameras are now a reality, 4K video cameras are also not only available but do not cost multiple appenadges and first born offspring. All of which is the perfect storm for CFAST 2.0 and its 6Gb/s SATA interface. Unfortunately, camera manufactures are a conservative bunch, and at this time none of opted for this new interface. Instead only a handful of 4K video cameras have gone for it. This however is expected to change in the very near future. For example, Canon has promised a “revolutionary leap forward” in frames per second with their next generation cameras. With CompactFlash already maxed out in the 1Dx camera this most likely means a new standard is about to -at the very least - supplement CompactFlash in the next generation camera. Our bet is on CFast 2.0. We feel this is a very safe bet as CFast 2.0 uses the exact same form-factor as CompactFlash. To be specific it uses the Type 1 CompactFlash form-factor (43mm x 36mm x 3.3mm). This form-factor has proven its merits to both card manufactures and camera manufactures as it allows more than enough room for a large controller, a ram IC for the controller buffer, and multiple NAND ICs. More importantly it also allows for plenty of room for large metal heatsinks. Since it also uses the SATA standards the cards can also have higher performance controllers than CF cards. This form-factor and underlying design is a proven combination with camera enthusiasts and professionals, and while it will mean purchasing all new storage cards speeds of up to 540MB/s - and frames per second ratings equally large - should push consumers towards this new CFAST 2.0 standard. Equally important this form-factor and SATA foundation is well understood by card manufactures, so actually designing and producing CFast 2 cards is not as expensive an undertaking as it is with XQD and its PCIe based standard. This in turn means cheaper CFAST 2.0 cards, which will also help push CFast 2.0 ahead of XQD. Time will tell if our educated guess is correct, but it is the logical answer to the problem of what to replace CompactFlash interface with. 3600x & 3500x - Closer Look As both models are part of Lexar’s professional series, both are identical in size and shape. In fact, both are nearly interchangeable for the 3400X series they replace. That is to say all are elegant, classy; however yet unlike the 1066 vs 3400x series, these two new models cannot be easily confused with one another. This is because Lexar has opted for their ‘silver’ motif for the 3500X and their ‘gold’ for their 3600X. As we will see later in the review, this silver vs gold impression has more to do with asking price than performance – as both have stellar performance! Also on the positive side the back of the case not only goes over the usual details but also states what the card's performance rating is in MB/s. More importantly it lists both the read and write performance specifications. In the 3500X case that is 445MB/s write, and 510MB/s read write; whereas the 3600X’s case it is 445MB/s and 540MB/s. Compare and contrast that with the 3400X’s 270/510 specifications and both of these new models are obvious improvements over their predecessor in the crucial write department. Continuing the silver and gold trend the 3500X CFast 2 card itself uses a silver color scheme, whereas the 3600X uses the more classical gold. This is actually a good thing as telling one from the other is as simple as looking at them. We personally have lost count of the number of times we have reached into our parts bag and pulled out a 3400X CFast card (and tried using it) when a CF card was needed…and vice versa. The only possible confusion will be between the 3600X and the 1066x/800x/ etc CF card series. This is because the gold color scheme was always used for professional grade CF cards, and now with the CFast card also using it…things can get tricky. Luckily, most still photography enthusiasts will be upgrading from 800/1066 cards (and cameras) to the 3500X, and here the silver does stick out nicely. Also, Lexar has upgrade the gold design so it is not that difficult to tell the new from the old. Beyond the label there is also a few other minor points of variance. While yes both use the CompactFlash/CFAST type 1 form-factor of 43mm X 36mm X 3.3mm the 3600X does weight slightly more than the 3500X. To be precise the 3500X weighs in at 8.5grams (or about the same as the 3400X series), whereas the 3600X is 11grams. This may not sound like much, but is actually a 29 percent difference. While some of this difference is due to the increased amount of NAND used in the 128GB models vs 64GB capacity models, a lot of it has to do with the extra beefy heatsink used on the 3600X. Basically the 3500X makes use of the same heatsink design as the 3400X (that is to say very capable for a still photography card), but the 3600X uses more metal. This is because the 3600X is expected to be in continues use until full, whereas the 3500 and 3400 series are more intended for burst shooting and then followed by short periods of cool down. This increased cooling is one of the ways in which the 3600X can guarantee better continuous performance. The other way in which these two series differ is in the firmware. As we will show you in the testing stage the 3600X’s firmware has been tweaked for increase sequential and large file handling performance. This makes sense as 4K ARRI cameras deal with massive files and only massive files so making this area paramount does make sense. However, the downside to this is the 3500X can actually be faster than the 3600X in certain circumstances – as it is expected to be dealing with a wide variety of file sizes in a more random pattern. Sadly, due to the lack of camera’s using CFast 2, there is also a lack of governing standards. This is why the seemingly faster 3600X can sometimes be outclassed by the 3500X – as the ‘4K’ standard is rather lax compared to VPG standards previous CF cards were held to. Hopefully as cameras come out that use CFast 2.0 this lack of standards will be rectified and allow consumers a better idea on what to expect from each model! On the positive side, internally both are very similar in their layout and design with both using 4 NAND ICs, a ram IC for cache, and a high performance SATA controller. 3600x & 3500x - Image Rescue 5 Now in its fifth iteration the aptly named Image Rescue 5 program does exactly what its name implies. It rescues accidentally deleted images. Nothing more, nothing less. Weighing in at about 10MB of idle memory usage (and under 150MB during peak usage) Lexar's Image Rescue 5 is one of the lighter weight applications you will find in its class. Now don’t let this small footprint fool you, as this is a rather powerful program…it is just one that doesn't come with a lot of RAM filling nonsense. To be blunt, if you are looking for an all in one program that slices, dices, and juliennes fries, then this program is not for you. Instead if you are serious about your photography - and you obviously must be as you purchased a 3400X Lexar Professional card - then you will find this simple and easy to use program rather refreshing. Now to be fair, this program does not just restore deleted images it also allows you to format, and secure format your cards before you sell them or dispose of them. This however is the only concession to the 'more is more' fad that has been sweeping the industry for years now. On its own this program retails for $34, but honestly since it comes free with most of Lexar's recent Professional series we doubt many would have to purchase it separately. However, it is actually worth the cost as it and its predecessors have saved many a photo (and review deadline) over the years for us. To use this program all you need do is install the executable, type in the key that came with the card and plug in any memory card that you want to restore images from. Before we move on, making their Image Rescue program brand agnostic is impressive and will certainly come in handy if you have a bagful of SanDisk, and other brand cards. When you do run the program you will be greeted with a small and deceptively simple window that is about the same size as your typical pop-up window. It will automatically scan for attached memory cards and then wait for you to select the appropriate one. The scan will take some time, and will vary greatly depending on size of the card and the speed, but speed is actually the bigger determining factor. Thankfully with CFast 2.0 cards this process is a lot faster than it is compared to CompactFlash cards. In either case during this process the Image Rescue 5 program will show you a basic status bar and tell you how far along it is in the process. It will not however tell you how much longer it will take to complete. Be patient, as there are 3 phases. Please understand that the more data blocks with actual data on them the longer the process will take, but in all likelihood the image thumbnail creation may take longer than the scan. Thankfully you can turn this feature off, but if you do all you will be presented with is a wall of blank thumbnails without any names. This is the largest weakness of the program, and if you use this 'feature' be prepared to restore all the images. Though to be fair, doing it that way is actually faster than waiting for thumbnail creation and choosing only a few images to restore. Either way Image Rescue 5 will ask you where you want to save the rescued images - and for obvious reasons the card itself is not an option. When done, thank your older self's foresight in installing this application, and make your future-self promise to never delete the wrong images again. With all that being said, the chances of success will vary greatly. On one end of the spectrum is a near guaranteed success rate and the other is almost guaranteed failure. Where your particular scenarios falls depends greatly on what you do once you realize your mistake, if you have formatted the card, and what camera you are using. This does take a bit of explaining, but it all boils down to the fact that the Image Rescue 5 program is not a miracle worker. If the cell blocks have been over-written your image is toast. So the sooner you do stop writing to the drive the better the chances of success are. However, unless the cell blocks are actually used you do still stand a great chance of getting at least some of the pictures back. Formatting the card however is an instant failure as TRIM command is baked right into the CFast standard so if you do this you will get the 'lost' images back. Needless to say, time is of the essence when dealing with accidentally deleted images, and just because you could restore images after a format from your first camera doesn't mean your new camera will be as accommodating. 3600x & 3500x - Testing and Results Testing external storage designed for use in cameras is not like testing solid state drives, or even compact storage devices like 'thumb drives'. These devices have very unique standards and have been optimized for highly specialized roles. For this reason, we have chosen to a combination of synthetic and real world tests that will show the intended customer base what the real strengths and weaknesses of a product line are. To this end we have chosen ATTO, AS-SSD, and Crystal DiskMark for our synthetic test suites. However, we have opted to no include any deep queue depth testing. Instead only the sequential, medium size, and single queue small file size tests are run. ATTO's full range of file sizes will be included but this only so that consumers can see the performance curves a given storage device offers. Furthermore, we will be significantly discounting any results under the 8K mark in ATTO. For real world we have opted for our usual real world transfer test. This is a two-part test. The first consist of timing how long a single 30GB (30 Billion bytes) .rar file takes to copy to, and then from the devices. The second consists of timing how long it takes to copy to and then from 15GB (15 Billion bytes) worth of small files (from 100kb to 200MB) with a total 36,000 files in 1200 subfolders. For the card reader we have opted for Lexar's WorkFlow USB 3.0 series. This series offers great performance, reasonable prices, and is specialized for a specific interface. IE each format has its own WorkFlow model that has been tuned for that particular storage type. In between each test run the storage device is wiped and ensured to be in a virgin state via manual TRIM'ing the device using AIS's FreeSpaceCleaner. All tests are run four times and only averages are shown. Main Test System Processor: Intel i7 5930K Memory: 32GB Corsair Ballistix DDR4-2666 Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth X99 Cooling: Noctua U12S SSD: 1x Intel 750 1.2TB NVMe SSD Power Supply: Corsair AX860i Monitor: Dell U2714H OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 Card Reader: Lexar USB 3.0 WorkFlow card reader Synthetic Test Results For synthetic tests we have used a brand new Lexar WorkFlow USB 3.0 CFast card reader. The reason for using this particular card reader is not because of any brand favoritism; rather we found it to be one of the best - and one of the few - CFast 2.0 card readers available today. Before we being, we do however have to explain one set of numbers: the sequential read. Put simply these cards are so fast that the USB 3.0 reader simply can't keep up. We did retest it using a micro-SATA cable adapter and they cruised along at their rated speeds, but this radical change in interfaces would not have been fair to the other cards in the chart (as they had to use the USB protocol which does introduce a lot of overhead). We feel this is fair as a Lexar reader was used. As such 400Mb/s is about the most you will see via USB 3.0 - on Lexar equipment. To be honest that is fast no matter how you look at it, but if you want all the performance they have to offer a ten dollar cable adapter is all that is needed. ATTO Disk Benchmark The ATTO disk benchmark tests the drives read and write speeds using gradually larger size files. For these tests, the ATTO program was set to run from its smallest to largest value (.5KB to 8192KB) and the total length was set to 256MB. The test program then spits out an extrapolated performance figure in megabytes per second. AS-SSD AS-SSD is designed to quickly test the performance of your drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and small 4K read/write speeds as well as 4K file speed at a queue depth of 6. While its primary goal is to accurately test Solid State Drives, it does equally well on all storage mediums it just takes longer to run each test as each test reads or writes 1GB of data. Crystal DiskMark Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5 and size at 100MB. As you can see both of these new models offer drastically improved write performance, and better overall read performance. However as alluded to earlier in the review the ‘slower’ 3500X can be – under the right circumstances –faster than the 3600X. Basically the firmware of the 3500X allows that series to be slightly quicker at small file performance compared to 3600X. With that being said the differences is minor, but considering the 3600X does cost more than the 3500X this certainly is something to take into consideration before blindly buying the more expensive model. Theoretical Burst Speed Improvements As there are zero CFast 2 photography cameras available right now, we cannot show you exactly what real world benefits these new CFast 2.0 cards have offer. What we can do however is interpret the data and project what the potential is. To this end we have chosen two existing cameras. The massive 50-megapixel Canon EOS 5Ds, and the professional Nikon D4S. Both of these cameras are slated to be replaced in the near future (sometime in 2016) and based upon statements from both companies both replacements will use CFast 2.0 interface instead of CompactFlash. For simplicity sake we are going to label these Canon EOS 5DS 2.0 and Nikon D5. We are also going to assume both have the same onboard buffer capacity, have the same Frames Per Second abilities, and both take the same size pictures as their existing (real) counterparts. In the case of the Canon EOS 5Ds that means 75 Megabyte RAW files at 5 FPS, and for the D5 means 25 Megabyte RAW files at 11 Fps. The following chart will show how long in seconds you can then hold down the trigger until a slowing of FPS will occur. As you can see it is quite possible that by simply swapping out the CF for CFast 2 that both of these cameras could never fill up their buffer until the card is full! The same cannot be said of the earlier 3400X, and in all likelihood this explains the release of these new series – as Micron/Lexar work closely with these companies to ensure that they are ready for the next generation before the next generation is released. 3600x & 3500x - Score Card, Performance Summary & TL;DR Accessories: 4 out of 5 Lifetime warranty, actually useful software, and usual clamshell card holder. There really is not much to complain about on this side of things. Read performance: 25 out 25 The read performance that CFAST 2.0 cards like these Lexar cards have to offer are simply amazing. You literally will have to have a high end Solid State Drive to keep up with either series. Put another way you will be hard pressed to notice a difference between the 3500 and 3600 series unless you own high performance solid state drives. We do, and we did; but even then both were impressive. Write performance: 39 out of 40 While there is no denying that there is still some room for improvement, both of these new series offer noticeably better write performance than the 3400X – and that is indeed impressive considering the 3400X was a darn fast card. Now if only camera manufactures would get onboard so that more consumers could take advantage of all that speed. Warranty: 9 out of 10 Just as with the all Professional series, the Lexar 3500X & 3600X Professional series come with a lifetime warranty that is backstopped by one of the largest NAND manufactures in the world: Micron. This means that the Lexar Professional lifetime warranty is indeed a true lifetime warranty and will be honored for your lifetime and not the cards! The only minor issue is RMA'ing one may mean shipping it to the States. If you have a Micron RMA depot in your country, then you can consider this card a perfect 10. Value: 17 out of 20 Both of these new series may indeed cost more than the outgoing 3400X series, but both easily justify their increased expense. Mix in an equally good lifetime warranty, with good software and while the neither will be the great value of the 1066X series they both are still pretty darn good. Final Score: 94 / 100 There is no denying that these two new series cost more than the 3400X we recently looked at; however, both series easily justify their extra cost through noticeably better performance. Honestly, for the average consumer either series would be a great choice, but if you are concerned with which model to stick in your new DSRL, the 3500X is the more optimal choice. 3600x & 3500x - Closing Statement As we saw throughout testing consumers interested in either of these two new series really cannot make a bad choice by opting for one over the other. Instead both are safe choices, but both do have different strengths and weaknesses due to different design goals. As such some consumers may spend more than they need to. For most photography consumers, the cheaper 3500X will be the more optimal solution as it offers basically the same read and write performance of the 3600X, but also offers slightly better small file r/w performance; and does both at lower price point. All these consumers need do…is now wait for Canon and Nikon to announce their new cameras that use this new technology. By the same token professionals who are interested in using their video camera for extended periods of time will find the better long term performance, better heat dissipation performance, and generally slightly more robust case of the 3600X worth the price premium. Basically the 3500X is for still cameras where even in burst mode the amount of data pushed will be in the single digit Gigabyte range and occur in a more random fashion – with time for the NAND to cool down. The 3600X on the other hand is for people who will plug it in, fill it to capacity in one long shoot, replace it with another card…and rinse and repeat all day long – as they are on a film set and time is money! Equally important is neither group of consumer should now consider the 3400X to be a ‘deal’ – as it is vastly inferior to this new generation and has been End Of Lifed (EOL). Yes, they are still going to be available on retail shelves until stock is depleted but the upfront savings are simply not worth it. Stick to the new generation. 3500X 3600X

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