microSD’s Days Are Numbered: Samsung Intros World’s First UFS Memory Cards

Samsung is the first memory vendor out-of-the-gate with Universal Flash Storage memory cards, or UFS for short. UFS cards are widely expected to replace the microSD cards many of us have been using for quite some time, whether it’s because we’ve plugged one into an MP3 player, a camera, or even our smartphones. The ultimate goal? Speed!

The UFS standard has been built with the help of a number of different companies, including Sony Ericsson, Texas Instruments, Nokia, Micron, and SK Hynix, so don’t fret: there’s nothing proprietary about them. That said, you’re in for a real challenge if you plan to pick one of these new cards up, as there are no devices on the market right now that can accept them. That could soon change, and we’re sure that Samsung will be part of the reason why.

So what about this speed we were talking about? This first crop of UFS cards can achieve read speeds of up to 530MB/s, which puts it on par with SATA-based solid-state drives for our PCs. The write speed is much slower, but “slower” is the wrong word to use: that’s up to 170MB/s.

Simple math can tell us that these cards will provide a lot of breathing room. Even if you are to film a video at 100Mbps, that’s a mere 12.5MB/s, or 7% of the card’s write capabilities. It’s the read speed that’s going to prove the ultimate feature, though: if the 256GB card was 100% full, it’d take just 8 minutes to pull all of the data off. That’d assume that the drive you’re writing to could keep up, though, which means you’d need to be transferring it to a PCIe-based SSD.

But, it gets even better. microSDs have typically been spec’d at around 1,800 IOPs, whereas these new UFS cards boost that to 40,000. That’s more than fast enough to house an operating system. Perhaps in time, we’ll see people keep secret OSes installed on one of these cards? A UFS card is a lot easier to hide than a USB flash drive, after all; you could fit it in your wallet and it wouldn’t even be noticed!

As the image above highlights, the pin layout on the back of these UFS cards is completely different from microSD, so unfortunately, they are not backwards compatible.

We’re not sure when these first UFS cards will hit the market, but as it’s currently not possible to actually use them, we suppose we’ll need to wait until Samsung decides to implement UFS into its Galaxy mobile series, or for some other company to pop-up with a solution.