Introduction

Pergear entered the memory card market later than many of the bigger players, but in 2022 and 2023 they launched high-spec CFexpress Type B and Type A cards at far more budget-friendly prices. They’re quickly carving out a place for themselves alongside more established brands.

When they asked if I wanted to test their newest card, I agreed—mainly because I wanted to see how it stacks up against the cards I already use in my cameras. Let’s take a closer look.

I tested this card on a 46 Mp Nikon Z7ii
You can see this review as a YouTube video here!

Specifications

IMG

Disclosure

Pergear kindly provided the memory cards and card reader for test and review purposes.

Why Memory Cards Matter

One of the most important parts of a modern camera is the memory card. We buy them out of necessity—mainly as a way to record our pictures and footage in the field, then transfer them safely to our hard drives back home or in the office.

Like with a mule, what matters is how much load it can carry and how quickly it can transport that load—including loading and unloading. And just as it’s important that a mule doesn’t damage the cargo during the journey, it’s equally crucial that a memory card doesn’t corrupt our data.

Because of that, we often spend quite a bit on them, and the price usually comes down to three key factors: capacity, speed, and reliability.

In this review, I’ll look at how the card compares with my other current cards and how it measures up against the company’s own specifications.

Reliability is trickier to judge, since that really shows itself only after years of use.

With that in mind, let’s see how the card performs in practice.

Contenders and Tests Setup

I compare the Pergear card with the cards I regularly  use:

	— Lexar Professional Pro Gold CFexpress Type B- — 128 GB R: 1750 MB/S W: 1500 MB/s —
	— Sony XQD G — 64 GB R: 400 MB/s W: 400 MB/s —
	— Kingston Canvas React Plus V90 SD — 64 GB R: 300 MB/s W: 260 MB/s —
	— Sony 128GB UHS-II TOUGH V60 SD- — 128 GB R: 277 MB/s W: 150 MB/s —
	— SanDisk Extrem PRO 128GB V30 SD — 128 GB R: 170 MB/s W: 90 MB/s —

I tested all cards in my Nikon Z7II, when applicable. The Pergear and Lexar CFE cards were tested in the Pergear’s 2-in-1 USB4.0 reader connected to a USB 4.0 port. All the SD cards were tested in my laptop’s internal SD Express 7.0 card reader.

Tests

This section details the technical methodology and results of the performance tests. Readers who are primarily interested in the final assessment may proceed directly to the conclusion.

A comparison of the listed specifications in the previous section reveals that the Sony XQD card, despite being the oldest and slowest non-SD card in this group, has a higher theoretical speed than even the fastest SD card. Additionally, the Pergear card’s theoretical speed is more than double that of the fastest non-SD card. Now, we will test the performance of these cards.

Synthetic Benchmark

For the initial benchmark, I used CrystalDiskMark with the Flash Memory preset. The tests were run in three rounds, using block sizes of 128 MiB, 1 GiB, and 8 GiB. After repeating the full test multiple times, I selected the complete result set that recorded the highest overall write speed for this analysis. The results are as follows:

As you can see in the test results above, the different block sizes show minimal variation in performance. For the remainder of this analysis, I will use the 1 GiB data block results as they provide an ideal balance of speed and accuracy. The primary focus will be on the SEQ1M Q8T1 results, as they are the most indicative of a card’s sustained write performance for demanding tasks such as video recording, fast bursts of RAW images, or even reading the files from the card to the computer.

The card’s tested read speed of 3367 MB/s is an excellent result, closely approaching the manufacturer’s theoretical peak of 3500 MB/s. It is important to remember that these advertised peaks are rarely achieved in real-world scenarios due to system overhead and other factors.

The tested write speed of 2350 MB/s shows a more significant difference from the advertised 3400 MB/s. However, this is expected, as the manufacturer’s stated sustained write speed is 800 MB/s—a guaranteed minimum. Our test result of 2350 MB/s indicates the card’s actual, real-world sustained performance, while far from the peak performance, is much better than the lowest performance.

To compare it with other cards, I ran the same test on the cards and here is the data

The results also show that the oldest and slowest non-SD card is faster the newest and fastest SD card. It also show that the Pergear does quite well to match its peak read performance, the write performance, while much faster all the others, is not among the best compared to the advertised peak performance.

In-Camera Burst Performance

For this test, I used the Nikon Z7II and set the shutter release mode to its maximum of 10 fps. Image quality was set to 14-bit RAW+JPG (highest size and quality), meaning each shutter press produced two files with a combined size of 80.6 MB.

Regardless of which card was used, the camera managed 33–34 shots before hitting the buffer limit. This shows that, in this case, the bottleneck is the camera itself, not the memory cards. In other words, all of them perform equally well in this specific test.

Computer Transfer Speed Test

For this this, I put enough RAW and JPEG files in a folder so that it is enough to fill a 64GB card, formatted the card, and copied the files to the card. Then I deleted all the files on the computer HD, and copied back the files from card to HD. The times are in the table below:

In this table, the write-speed numbers aren’t all that important, since we almost never copy files from a hard drive back to a memory card.

What matters more is the read speed, and here we can clearly see that the Pergear CFE card is noticeably faster than the others in the test — especially compared to the SD cards.

One last note on card readers: if your card has a read speed above 1000 MB/s, use a reader that supports USB 4.0 or Thunderbolt. Otherwise, the reader will bottleneck performance at around 1000 MB/s

Alternatives

*  $127 at Pergear Store

(Affiliate links)

Conclusion

As expected, CFexpress cards are much faster than SD cards, and this Pergear card is no exception, and even with a big margin. Its big advantage is price: compared to similar CFexpress cards from other brands, it’s far more budget-friendly. In fact, if you look at cost per gigabyte, it can even work out cheaper than SD cards — another solid reason to consider it.

If you’re a hobby photographer who wants the fastest cards available, or if you tend to shoot so much that you end up with hundreds or even thousands of images before downloading, and you find transfers to your computer take too long, then a CFexpress card is worth investing in. But don’t buy one just because you occasionally shoot bursts at your camera’s top speed and largest file size — in that case, a good SD card is usually enough.

On the other hand, if you’re using one of the latest high-resolution cameras (50+ MP), shoot long bursts at over 20 frames per second, or record a lot of video, then CFexpress becomes much more appealing. In that scenario, this Pergear card offers excellent value for money.

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Further Reading

What camera gear and accessories do I use most frequently?

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What’s in my camera bag?  MY 2024 KIT!!

• Main camera : https://amzn.to/3TsGtKg
• Camera grip : https://amzn.to/4e0G3CR
• Memory Card 1: https://amzn.to/47pA20i
• Memory Card 2 : https://amzn.to/3XHYxlZ 
• Camera 2 : https://amzn.to/3Xifou8
• Camera grip: https://amzn.to/4dYYpV9
• Memory card 1: https://amzn.to/4e5h2H0
• Memory card 2: https://amzn.to/3zu7W7n
• Small travel tripod: https://amzn.to/4goIX68
  
• Mini tripod: https://amzn.to/4e09XXX
• Small shoulder bag: https://amzn.to/47tPMiY
• Medium shoulder bag: https://amzn.to/4ej4bjY

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Martin

Martin M.H. lives outside Stockholm, Sweden. He is a M.Sc. in Computer Technology but he has been a passionate photographer for over 50 years. He started his photographic adventures when he was thirteen with an Agfamatic pocket camera, which he soon replaced with a Canon rangefinder camera that his mom gave him in his teenages. After that he has been using Canon SLR, Nikon SLR manual focus and Autofocus, Sony mirrorless crop sensor, Nikon DSLR and Nikon Mirrorless. He has photographed any genre he could throughout the years and you can see all kind of images in his portfolio. During the later years though it has been mostly landscape, nature, travel and some street/documentary photography.

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