We all love lots of storage space in our digital devices, and we all love that storage to be a fast as possible. If that’s you then the latest offering from Samsung may be up your alley. Their latest cards are based on the new Universal Flash Storage (UFS) standard and come in 256, 128, 64 and 32 GB sizes and boast some of the fast read and write speeds in the removable card space.
The new cards are expected to bring up to a 5 times improvements in sequential read times, being able to read 5GB of data in about 10 seconds, down from about 50 seconds with traditional SD cards, achieving peak read speeds of 530 MB/s. Write times get a boost as well with the cards clocked in a 170MB/s almost double the speed of top-end SD cards.
That’s all great, however, we’re not aware of any Mobile devices that actually support the new UFS standard, this is a replacement for MicroSD, not the next generation. So whilst it’s great to have these fast cards on the market, until we’ve got some devices to throw them into, this all feels like a bit of an academic exercise.
However, with the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 due to arrive in a month or two, it would be easy to see Samsung, who have been heavily involved with developing this standard, swap out the MicroSD card for a UFS card on that device. Due to my experience with inconsistent SD card reliability, I buy a new card with every new device, so I for one would be very happy to see SSD-like performance out of my removable storage moving forward.
If you want to read a little more about UFS start here at the Universal Flash Storage Association website, or check out their FAQ.
Are you ready to start the change over from the MicroSD to the UFS standard? Do you think the industry will adopt it? Let us know below.
Hell yes, sounds great. Shame that no current devices support it, if Samsung is pushing for this as a standard, it could have right ahead and built on in support. Although it’s a selling point I guess for new phones. Perhaps I’ll have to wait for the s8