Samsung have created some new, awesomely fast storage cards, problem is, there are no devices on sale today that can handle them. Unveiled are the industry’s first memory cards based on the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 1.0 standard. As the world continues its insatiable thirst for storage, things need to get faster, much faster as we move into 360 and VR cameras, higher quality cameras and action cams, drones that shoot 4K and the latest DSLRs.
The technology industry usually moves incrementally, especially in developed industries. This is one of the rare times where we’re seeing genuinely leap forward. If you’re sitting there with some fancy class 10 microSD cards around you, then forget about it, these are faster, by a mile.
These UFS cards, have a reading sequentially at 530 MB/s which is similar to the most widely used SSDs. This means you could read a Full-HD movie, 5GB in size, in around 10 seconds. This compares to a typical microSD card which would take over 50 seconds. The format is also great at random reads at a rate of 40,000 IOPS, the 256GB card delivers more than 20x higher than your typical microSD card, which offers lowly 1,800 IOPS.
When it comes to write speeds, the new 256GB UFS card has a stupid fast 170MB/s sequential write speed, almost doubling the top-end microSD card speed. That means you could halve your copy times, which could actually save you or your employer money.
At times, video cameras are limited not by their image processor, but by their ability to write to the disk, but with UFS, its possible you could write 4K HDR with a high FPS without issue. As we know, camera quality will continue to advance and 8K is on the horizon. It’s developments in storage technology like this, that will allow us to skip on complex and expensive raid arrays and make it possible in your pocket.
The new Samsung UFS cards come in a range of storage capacities including 32, 64, 128, 256 GB. Samsung’s UFS cards are expected to bring a significant performance boost to the external memory storage market, allowing much more satisfying multimedia experiences.
Senior VP, Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering at Samsung Electronics, Jung-bae Lee says,
“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,”
“By launching our new high-capacity, high-performance UFS card line-up, we are changing the growth paradigm of the memory card market to prioritize performance and user convenience above all.”
If you’re a photographer and fire off a burst of 24 large JPEG photographs (~1,120 MB) with a high-end DSLR camera, the 256GB UFS card takes less than seven seconds to write that, compared to a microSD card which typically takes about 32 seconds, at 35MB/s. That’s a graphic demonstration of the effect and benefit this new format will have.
To sure the best performance, while being power-efficient, the UFS card supports multiple commands with command queuing features and enables simultaneous reading and writing through the use of separately dedicated paths, doubling throughput.
Samsung has been aggressive in preparing UFS solutions for the marketplace, and while they’re announcing the cards today, we don’t have any devices you can buy right now that support the format. Of course of the months and years ahead, we will see new devices that support it, but like USB Type-C, this will take some time to become mainstream.
Via The Verge.
