Samsung today announced the world's first MicroSD memory card successor, the UFS card. The cards are based on a new standard that will become the successor to microSD and should read data 5 times faster than its predecessor. UFS is the abbreviation for Universal Flash Storage which aims to replace eMMCs and SD cards.
The standard is supported by many large technology companies but there are currently no devices that support UFS cards. While the new cards look a lot like their microSD equivalent they have connectors in the middle instead of at the bottom end of the card.
The major and most important difference between UFS and microSD is the fact that they perform much better. Samsung specifies sequential read speeds of up to 530MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 170MB/s. The read speed is about 5x times more than the fastest microSD cards currently available, and the write speed is a big increase of the current 80MB/s to 90MB/s of the average microSD card.
Also when it comes to random reads the UFS cards beat microSD, Samsung promises a performance increase of 20x. According to the company the 256GB UFS card can read at 40,000 IOPS, while a typical microSD is able to randomly read data at about 1,800 IOPS. When it comes to random writes, the UFS card is specified at 35,000 IOPS,. According to Samsung that's 350 times faster than the 100 IOPs of a typical microSD card.
Because the connectors of the UFS cards are on a different place as microSD, they are currently no compatible devices. It's expected that Samsung will soon be the first to announce devices with a UFS slot.
UFS storage is already used in Samsung devices, the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge have built-in UFS memory.
The cards will be available in capacities of 32, 64, 128 and 256GB and are according to Samsung they are especially useful for high resolution and 360 degrees cameras which require fast storage. The Korean electronics giant has not disclosed any pricing and availability details.
