Samsung Introduces UFS-Based Memory Cards with Up to 256GB Capacity

Samsung’s UFS 2.0 based memory solutions, such as those seen on recent Galaxy flagships, do what we expect storage solutions to do. They are fast and they are reliable, and they are fast some more. Mario even noted the same in his Samsung Galaxy Note 5 XDA Review:

As seen in the benchmarks above, the UFS 2.0 storage solution is very, very fast. Not only is it relatively fast with Play Store installs and general file management, but the extra speed also comes in handy when we do what we do best — that is, flashing several ROMs and backing up or restoring our data. While a microSD card means that you can simply put whatever amount of music and media you want in a pinch, the storage speed of the Note5 makes many operations a breeze and backing up ROMs is as fast as it gets on this device.

Samsung’s embedded storage solutions really worked, and Samsung now wishes to share it with the rest of the world. Samsung Electronics has unveiled removable memory cards based on Universal Flash Storage 1.0 standard. The memory cards are available in a range of storage capacities, including 32, 64, 128 and 256 GB of storage.

These UFS cards bring the focus squarely on performance as they are focused on being part of devices with the need for (storage) speed such as high-res 3D gaming, and high-res movie playback. The claims made for these UFS cards include sequential read speeds of upto 530 MB/s, which is similar to the current crop of widely used SATA SSDs and five times faster than the typical 95 MBs/s sequential read of UHS-1 microSD cards. Sequential write speeds are claimed at 170 MB/s, almost double that of top microSD cards.

Note the pin arrangement, which is different from your microSD’s

So what next from here? Pricing and availability of these UFS cards have not been mentioned in the press release, and there is no mention of compatibility although documentation for that is being worked on. What this does mean is that we will see increased adoption of UFS based solutions in the high-end multimedia market at least, as it seeks to replace microSD cards in situations where speed of the card was the bottleneck, like in high-end DSLRs. Eventually, these will trickle down to smartphones as well, so all we can hope for is that they are competitively priced when they do.

What are your thoughts on these UFS cards from Samsung? Let us know in the comments below!