Samsung is ushering a new dawn of removable storage with their brand new — and world’s first — Universal Flash Storage (UFS) memory cards. These memory cards come in 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities with write speeds that are said to be five times faster than the fastest microSD cards.
The UFS cards have incredibly fast sequential read speeds of 530MB/s which simply blows everything else out of the water. To put this in practical terms, Samsung says that reading a 5GB Full HD movie would only take the card roughly 10 seconds. That’s mind boggling when you compare it to a regular UHS-1 microSD card (95MB/s sequential read speeds) that can accomplish that same feat in about 50 seconds.
Read speeds aren’t the only thing that’s improved, however. Write speeds have also nearly doubled to a whopping 170MB/s compared to a top-end SanDisk Extreme Pro card which only manages write speeds of up to 100MB/s.
Samsung says that these cards are designed to address the increased demand for high-resolution video and photo recording from high res cameras, 360-degree cameras, DSLRs, action cams and drones. These cards also improve the watching and playback experience for users.
The only problem is that there are no devices in the market right now that can support these cards as universal storage. Although the UFS cards may look like microSD cards, a quick flip around back reveals that the pins are in completely different locations. There is also no price and availability for these memory cards yet. But, logic would dictate that the first devices that will support this form of external memory would be Samsung’s own devices.
Perhaps with the upcoming Galaxy Note 7? While we think that that’s highly unlikely, one can hope, right?
