Home Consumer Samsung Announces UFS Removable Memory Cards

Samsung Announces UFS Removable Memory Cards

by Lyle Smith

Samsung has announced the industry’s first removable memory cards based on the JEDEC Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 1.0 Card Extension Standard. UFS is a technology specifically designed for mobile applications and computing systems that require high performance with low power consumption, such as high-resolution mobile shooting devices, 3D VR cameras, action cams and drones. The new UFS memory cards come in capacities of 256GB, 128GB, 64GB and 32GB. 


Samsung has announced the industry’s first removable memory cards based on the JEDEC Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 1.0 Card Extension Standard. UFS is a technology specifically designed for mobile applications and computing systems that require high performance with low power consumption, such as high-resolution mobile shooting devices, 3D VR cameras, action cams and drones. The new UFS memory cards come in capacities of 256GB, 128GB, 64GB and 32GB. 

Samsung indicates that their new UFS removable memory cards will also excel in high-resolution 3D gaming and high-resolution movie playback, claiming five times the sequential read performance compared to that of a typical microSD card. As such, Samsung quotes an impressive 530MB/s in sequential transfer rates while read IOPS performance should reach upwards of 40,000 (for the 256GB model). For writes, the 256GB UFS card is quoted to deliver 35,000 random IOPS, which is roughly a few hundred times the speed of a typical microSD card. Moreover, writes will also reach 170MB/s sequential speeds. This impressive increase in performance will significantly reduce multimedia data downloading time, photo thumbnail loading time and buffer clearing time in burst shooting mode.

Samsung indicates that this is made possible due to the support of multiple commands with command queuing features. This allows for simultaneous reading and writing via separately dedicated paths, virtually doubling throughput. However, Samsung also notes that the end user device needs a USF card slot and a UFS card management function in the application processor in order to use the new cards.

Samsung Memory Cards

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