It has been quite some time since the use of microSD card for removable storage started and many of us have had this thought in mind, what will follow the microSD cards for storage. Samsung has come out with an answer, their latest UFS cards are the answer having some insane speeds which is said to be five times faster compared to the conventional microSD cards. The UFS removable card standard was finalized in March by JEDEC based on UFS 2.0.
UFC 2.0 based internal memory was used in Galaxy S6 by Samsung for the first time replacing the e-MMC standard memory which was much slower comparatively. Samsung has now introduced UFS cards to help in expanding storage with this new faster alternative. There are storage options ranging from 32GB to 256GB UFS cards (32, 64, 128 and 256GB) having impressive read and write speeds much higher than the conventional microSD card.
With such improvements in read and write speeds, we can see improvements in performance of the devices they will be used in. We can say that the difference in performance will be similar to that of Laptops with SSD drive as compared to those having HDD drives. To know what exaclty we are talking about lets see how the read and write speeds of the UFS cards are in comparison to the microSD card.
A 256GB UFS card has sequential read speeds of up to 530MB/s and in general the UFS cards are as high as 20 times faster when compared to regular microSD cards. When it comes to write speeds, random write speeds is almost 350X higher than microSD card and Sequential write speeds is 170Mb/s which is twice as high.
To show these speeds in real life scenarios, Samsung says – devices with UFS cards can read a 5GB movie in 10 seconds, compared to 50 seconds for a 95MB/s microSD card. UFS cards can write 24 large JPG images in 7 seconds, compared to 32 seconds for a UHS-1 microSD which is quite impressive and the compant says that these UFS cards can be used in devices like DSLR, VR cams, action cams and drones. This is quite confusing as the company has not mentioned smartphones in the list.
This can be seen as a hint from Samsung that, the UFS cards will not be used in its upcoming phones in the near future. With the size and pin layout of the card different from the microSD card we can expect that it will take some time for manufacturers to ditch the microSD card and implement UFS cards as mainstream.
Wow, that is too fast! I’d like to see UFS card implemented in smartphone devices..Now that Samsung came up with this idea, I hope other companies chip in and improve the technology. Thanks for the info.
PS: there is a small typo in the 5th paragraph; compant > company.