Samsung Announces 1TB eUFS 2.1 Flash Storage For Future Smartphones

For many, smartphones have largely replaced desktops and notebooks, because they can get everything they need to get done right on that little screen. If you’re someone who fits into that mold, your hunger for more storage likely never goes away. Currently, the top storage device you can get today is 512GB, but that’s a definite outlier – the vast majority are much less.

Well, as time goes on, technology of course improves, and Samsung has proven that yet again with an announcement of 1TB eUFS flash memory, significantly higher than the typical ~64GB of storage many people wind up with nowadays (assuming we’re talking mid-to-high-range devices). This is accomplished by stacking 16 layers of 512-Gb V-NAND, and putting the memory behind a brand-new controller.

With 1TB on tap, this is an announcement that’s easy to discredit as a paper launch, one that will see its fruits in the distant future. Well, Samsung typically makes these kinds of announcements ahead of new smartphone launches, so it could very well be that we’ll actually see a 1TB Samsung Galaxy S10 option next month. We might not want to see the price tag, though. Even if there is no announcement next week, it’s so early in the year, that it seems likely we’ll see 1TB phones hit by at least the end of summer.

Big storage can sometimes bring caveats, but that doesn’t really seem to be the case here. Samsung says that this chip is at least 20x faster than microSD storage, and even SSD storage if we’re talking about SATA. Samsung says the 1TB eUFS can hit 1,000MB/s read, 260MB/s write, as well as 58,000 IOPS random read, and 50,000 IOPS random write. These speeds allow the memory to handle capture at 960 FPS, and not even break a sweat with most of the media that will be captured today.

Samsung says that it will be ramping up 1TB production in 1H2019 to meet the anticipated demand.