Lexar 1TB Silver CFeB Card – A Great Value

The Lexar Silver 1TB CFexpress Type-B card is an entry-level Lexar solution for photographers seeking the best bang for the buck. However, I shouldn’t say they are entry-level, as these Silver cards outperform the best cards from most other brands.

If you need a card that lets you take advantage of all the features of a Nikon Z8 and Z9, including recording NRAW at 722MB/s, this card is one of the few that will let you do that, and it’s priced very competitively.

Lexar was kind enough to send me a sample, so let’s examine its performance.

So what’s the catch? How is this card so good for such a competitive price?

It’s missing a few bells and whistles compared to the higher-end cards like the Lexar Gold Series or the Diamond series.

For one, it has a 10-year warranty rather than the usual lifetime warranty, and its rated write speed and sustain speed are slightly slower than those of the Diamond and Gold cards. The Lexar Gold and Diamond cards are also advertised as having a rugged build. That’s pretty much it.

That makes the Lexar Silver 1TB card the best general-purpose CFexpress memory card.

Lexar 1TB Silver Series CFexpress Type-B Benchmarks

To test this memory card, I used the Lexar CFexpress Type-B 20Gbps memory card reader with AJA System Test, which allows me to benchmark memory cards across various codecs and file sizes. When running repeated 4GB tests, I was able to outperform the Rated Write speed, and the Read speeds came in very close to the rated speed.

I also pushed about 384GB of data to the card to test the sustained speeds, which came in above the rated sustained speed. I did this by continuously pushing the 64GB write cycle to the card to see if the heat had any impact, and then took the lowest number.

Card Tested	Write Speed	Read Speed	Sustain Speeds
Lexar Silver CFeB 1TB Rated	1300 MB/s	1750 MB/s	1200 MB/s
Lexar Silver CFeB 1TB Tested	1661 MB/s	1732 MB/s	1382 MB/s

To test video performance, I recorded a single 8k60p NRAW 722MB/s recording from the Nikon Z8 to fill the card and had no issues. The Hot Card warning came on after about 11 minutes, but I could finish the 22-minute recording without the camera shutting down from the heat.

Sustained Disk Write Captures

The sustained disk writes behavior is where this card differs slightly from the Gold and Diamond cards. It looks like it has a very fast peak when it first starts reading. It’s probably some 4GB SLC-type fast flash cache that periodically dumps to a slower flash in 2GB chunks. This gives us a max slow speed of around 850GB and an average of around 1300MB/s

Lexar Diamond Series Disk Writes For Comparison

Here are the Disk Writes From the Diamond card as a comparison.

This Lexar 512GB Diamond memory card has a much tighter pattern than the Silver card above.

Excellent results, and Lexar has been on a roll again, keeping the competition on their toes. I also want to point out that I tested these cards in most CFexpress cameras, and Lexar has some of the best camera firmware compatibility of any brand, with the other brand being Delkin.

There is a whole line of Lexar Silver Series CFexpress Type-B memory cards, so be sure to pay attention to the different sizes in this series. They all perform a little differently.

Is There Any Competition?

I do not see any other brand beating this new 1TB Lexar Silver card in terms of price and performance. Lexar has pretty much swept up the competition. If you wanted to increase your spending for a rugged build, you could use a Lexar Gold 1TB card or the Hoodman Steel 1TB CFexpress Card, which has worked well for me in my Z8. That would be pretty much the only other card I would recommend in this range.