CF Card

CF- Compact Flash card is a mass storage device that is mostly used in electronic devices such as cell phones, iPods, and tablets. It is developed by SanDisk in 1994 that uses flash memory to store data on extremely small card. CF card again divided into two types such as Compact Flash Type I and Compact Flash Type II. CF Type I card thickness is 3.3 mm where as CF Type II is 5 mm. Micro drives and other devices, such as the Hasselblad CFV Digital Back for the Hasselblad series of medium format cameras uses Compact Flash Type II slot. CF card speed is specified in four types such as original CF(using CF+/CF2.0), CF high Speed, Faster CF 3.0 standard and faster CF 4.0 standard.

The CF card interface is a 50-pin subset of the 68-pin PCMCIA- Personal Computer Memory Card International Association connector. Interface operates depending on the state of a mode pin or power up as either a 16-bit PC card or as an Integrated Development Environment interface. Its IDE mode defines an interface that is minor than, but electrically alike to the ATA interface. ATA controller in a CF device, appears to be host device if it is a hard disk and it’s operate at 3.3 volts or 4 volts and can be swapped from PC to PC.

At first, flash memory used Flash File system and JFFS to work in low-level technical problems. However, compact flash cards uses in consumer devices are normally formatted as FAT12 and FAT32. In addition, CF cards are formatted with any type of file system such as Ext, JFS and NTFS. Later it can be divided into partitions as long as the PC or any host device can read or write into them. Sometimes CF cards are used instead of hard drives in embedded systems, dumb terminals and different small form factor PC’s that are built for low noise output and power consumption.

Features of Compact Flash Card

• Compact Flash Card Specification 3.0 compliant
• Operating Modes:
  • PC Card Memory Mode
  • PC Card I/O Mode
  • True-IDE Mode
  • Ultra DMA Mode supported up to Mode 4
• High reliability assured based on the internal Error Correcting Code (ECC) function.
• Auto Standby and Sleep Mode supported
• Consistent wear-leveling algorithm to make sure the best of flash endurance
• Very low power consumption
• Very high performance
• Rugged environment is working well
• Automatic error correction and retry capabilities
• Supports power down orders and Auto Stand-by or Sleep Mode
• +5 V ±10％ or +3.3 V ±5％ operation
• Low weight
• Noiseless
• MTBF > 2,000,000 hours
• Minimum 10,000 insertions
• Support Operating System: Windows NT/2000/XP/2003, Windows 31/95/98/Me, WinCE, QNX, Linux, DOS and more
• Storage Capacity: 128MB, 256MB, 512 MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB (unformatted)

For Compact Flash Card recovery, please visit here.