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The age of the microSD card could exist coming to an finish thank you to Samsung'south latest storage product. The company has appear UFS cards with considerably college data speeds, and capacities as high as 256GB. Whereas even the fastest microSD cards struggle to keep up with new USB specifications, UFS cards are as speedy as a desktop SSD. Sound too good to exist true? Well, there's a drawback: UFS cards have different contacts and aren't backward compatible with microSD slots.

Most of the NAND flash storage currently used in mobile devices is based on the eMMC 5.0 standard. Samsung started using much faster UFS storage in its devices in 2022 with the Galaxy S6. That was only for the internal storage, though. The microSD bill of fare in your Milky way S7 (or any other device, for that matter) is nevertheless based on eMMC storage. As you can probably gather from the proper name, UFS cards put that aforementioned super-fast NAND inside a removable carte du jour. The newly announced cards apply the UFS 1.0 specification and internal telephone storage is already on UFS 2.0, but the cards are certainly no slouches.

The summit-of-the-line 256GB UFS card is capable of 530MB/due south sequential read speeds and 170MB/s sequential writes, according to Samsung. A typical microSD bill of fare can pull off about 100MB/s and 90MB/due south for sequential read and write speeds, respectively. The cards volition also exist available in 32, 64, and 128 gigabyte capacities, presumably with the same speeds. UFS relies on the SCSI transfer architecture, which allows the storage to have multiple commands with command queuing features. This improves internal efficiency dramatically, and it's paired with a new M-PHY electrical interface that's capable of up to 5.8Gbps per lane.

Samsung UFS_02

Note the unlike shape and contact arrangement compared with microSD.

Nearly of what people utilize removable storage for now is backing up large amounts of information that won't fit on the faster internal storage. Even so, Samsung thinks that removable storage will need to be faster in the future to take advantage of 3D VR video and ultra-high quality photos. Android devices likewise support adopting removable storage as part of the system, merging it with the internal NAND. Doing then with a microSD card can slow the device down, but a UFS card shouldn't have that problem.

Samsung hasn't released any pricing or availability information for its UFS cards yet, but don't await them to be inexpensive. We've been spoiled by the incredibly depression price of microSD cards for years, and the move to UFS might be a flake of a shock. No other manufacturers have announced UFS cards however, then Samsung gets to set the toll. As for timing, that will depend on when at that place are devices that back up UFS cards. I hope it's at least possible to create one slot that accepts both microSD and UFS cards. Otherwise, this is going to exist a painful transition.

At present read: How exercise SSDs work?