Camera storage has advanced to incredible levels

The world of solid state storage has been progressing at high speed, literally. We spoke with Western Digital about the current state of camera storage, and where it is all headed. We think you'll be impressed with where it is going.

This year at IBC its would have been all to easy to be distracted by all the new cameras and display technology on show. But all of that is nothing unless there's somewhere to store your footage. We caught up with Darragh O'Toole, Product Marketing Manager at Western Digital to find out what the current options for storage on the go.

During the conversation, Darragh highlighted just how far things have come, using the new 1TB SanDisk SD card, the world's fastest at the time of publication, as well as the company's 1TB Micro SD, a card he referred to as 'Klingon Technology'. A nod to the fact that it is simply incredible to find this level of storage capacity in such a small device.

At the more professional end of the market Darragh told us about the move from SATA to NVMe based storage. The industry is now moving from CFast to CFExpress, which is based around PCI NVMe and can currently achieve 1700MB per second read and 1400MB write speeds, which is three times as fast as the previous CFast specification. The new cards have the same form factor as XQD, and with firmware update can be work with cameras that use that format, such as the Nikon Z 6 and Z 7.

Finally we were shown just how far things have moved on when it comes to editing on the go. Using one of the company's blazing fast new SSDs, Darragh demonstrates how footage can be recorded straight onto the SSD from a BMPCC, and then literally plugged right into one of the latest iPads with the new iPadOS installed. Shooting and editing on the go with an iPad is now a practical thing to do.