MicroSD cards have serve us well, but as digital contents become larger in size, can our patience cope with the slowness offered by today’s microSD card? Probably not and hence, forward thinking tech company Samsung has plucked the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) technology found on its flagship devices and packed it into tiny memory cards, ready to be used as expandable storage for future devices like smartphones, digital cameras and more. Designed to be used with high-resolution imaging devices, Samsung’s UFS boasts significant performance over current horde of memory cards so you won’t have to wait forever for large files to be transferred.
And at what speeds are we talking about? 530 MB/s sequential read performance – that’s five times faster than a typical microSD card. To put it in perspective, a 5GB Full HD movie will take a UHS-1 microSD card over 50 seconds to read but it will only take UFS around 10 seconds. Write speed is blazing fast too, with rates up to 170 MB/s which is nearly twice as fast as the top performing microSD card today. With this new development, the benefit is obvious: capturing high resolution images on a DSLR, such as for example, 24 large/extra fine JPEG images, will only take less than 7 seconds with 256 UFS while it would a typical UHS-1 microSD takes around 32 seconds.
The benefits of UFS technology are obvious: photographers, for one, will see a reduction in media data downloading time, thumbnail loading time and buffer clearing time when shooting in burst mode. With the increasing number of 4K-capable devices generating high-resolution, bytes-intensive multimedia data, UFS is certainly the right direction for removable storage. It is worthy to mention that UFS has existed of late in some mobile devices, though removable form is yet to be available.
But before go ‘yay! faster storage’, you have to know that UFS memory card is not compatible to existing microSD card slot (hint: look at the pin configuration). This means, it will take a while before we see a widespread adoption. If we have learn anything, it is that new storage/media technology adoption will in fact take years. Just look at Blu-ray, and even SSD and microSD card itself. Nevertheless, we are looking forward to a faster digital life.
Images courtesy of Samsung.
