Samsung announces high speed UFS cards with theoretical read speeds of 530MB/s

Samsung has announced what could be the next generation of internal storage cards and the successor to the existing microSD cards, called the Universal Flash Storage or UFS cards. The cards come in 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB storage capacities. The prices for these cards have not yet been revealed. UFS cards come with a different sort of contact points as compared to a regular microSD card and are not compatible with microSD card slots. While the current typical microSD cards can reach theoretical speeds of 100 MB/s and 90 MB/s for sequential read and writes respectively, the 256GB UFS card can scale up to 530 MB/s and 170 MB/s for sequential read and writes respectively. That makes the UFS cards have almost desktop SSD grade speeds. The UFS standard has been in use for internal storage in Samsung Galaxy S6 onwards and more recently the Xiaomi Mi 5 was also released with the UFS 2.0 standard for internal storage. Otherwise the NAND storage in mobile devices is done via the eMMC 5.0 standard and the microSD card slots also use the eMMC standard. The UFS cards released by Samsung will come with the UFS 1.0 specification, but in essence it will be the same fast NAND that is generally seen on internal storage of the Galaxy S6/ S7 and so on. UFS standard supports SCSI (small computer system interface) transfer architecture which lets the card accept parallel commands with command queuing feature. It will also support simultaneous reading and writing via use of separately dedicated paths thereby doubling the throughput. “Our new 256GB UFS card will provide an ideal user experience for digitally-minded consumers and lead the industry in establishing the most competitive memory card solution,” said Jung-bae Lee, senior vice president, Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering at Samsung Electronics.