Samsung announces the first UFS removable storage cards that could replace the slower micro-SD cards, but devices with slots for the new type of media aren't available yet.
According to Computerworld, Samsung's UFS card is based on the Universal Flash Storage 1.0 Card Extension standard. This will come in capacities in the range from 32GB to 256GB. The new type of super-fast storage media could be used in various devices such as robots, drones, cameras, mobile devices and virtual reality headsets.
Samsung's UFS media fits the need for high-capacity and faster removable storage in electronics. The super-fast UFS memory cards can compete in performance with the current micro-SD media by moving data much faster in and out of the card.
A UFS memory card will allow users to read a full high-resolution movie file of around 5 GB of data in just 10 seconds. According to Samsung's claims, a UHS-1 micro-SD card would take 50 seconds to perform the same operation.
UFS cards can have the ability to extract and write video without lagging and they can be as fast as internal storage. This is important in the context of the current market, where cameras are now shooting 4K video. Especially in top-line cameras, this is something micro-SD cards struggle with.
The only problem is that UFS cards will fit only in specific slots, not present in current devices yet. It is still hard to predict when UFS card slots will reach devices, since moving to the new technology could take time. Chipmakers will have to make circuits and controllers, while device makers will have to design UFS slots into products.
It is unknown how successful UFS will become as storage media. Micro-SD cards today offer more storage, but the faster speed may give device makers a reason to implement UFS slots instead of the current micro-SD.
According to The Verge, Samsung claims that its 256 GB UFS memory card has a sequential read speed of 530 megabytes per second (MBps) and a random read speed 20 times faster than a micro-SD card. This is similar to the speed provided by some SATA-based solid state drives. The sequential write speed is about two times faster and the random write speed is 350 times faster than micro-SD.
