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Samsung Introduces World's First Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Memory Card

btarunr

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Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, today unveiled the industry's first removable memory cards based on the JEDEC Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 1.0 Card Extension Standard, for use in high-resolution mobile shooting devices such as DSLRs, 3D VR cameras, action cams and drones. Coming in a wide range of storage capacities including 256, 128, 64 and 32 gigabyte (GB), Samsung's UFS cards are expected to bring a significant performance boost to the external memory storage market, allowing much more satisfying multimedia experiences.

"Our new 256GB UFS card will provide an ideal user experience for digitally-minded consumers and lead the industry in establishing the most competitive memory card solution," said Jung-bae Lee, senior vice president, Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering, Samsung Electronics "By launching our new high-capacity, high-performance UFS card line-up, we are changing the growth paradigm of the memory card market to prioritize performance and user convenience above all."



Samsung's new 256GB UFS removable memory card ─ simply referred to as the UFS card will provide greatly improved user experiences, especially in high-resolution 3D gaming and high-resolution movie playback. It provides more than five times faster sequential read performance compared to that of a typical microSD card, reading sequentially at 530 megabytes per second (MB/s) which is similar to the sequential read speed of the most widely used SATA SSDs. With this UFS card, consumers have the ability to read a 5 GB, Full-HD movie in approximately 10 seconds, compared to a typical UHS-1 microSD card, which would take over 50 seconds with 95MB/s of sequential reading speed. Also, at a random read rate of 40,000 IOPS, the 256GB card delivers more than 20 times higher random read performance compared to a typical microSD, which offers approximately 1,800 IOPS.

When it comes to writing, the new 256GB UFS card processes 35,000 random IOPS, which is 350 times higher than the 100 IOPS of a typical microSD card, and attains a 170MB/s sequential write speed, almost doubling the top-end microSD card speed. With these substantial performance improvements, the new 256GB UFS card significantly reduces multimedia data downloading time, photo thumbnail loading time and buffer clearing time in burst shooting mode, which, collectively, can be particularly beneficial to DSLR camera users. To shoot 24 large/extra fine JPEG photographs (1,120 megabyte (MB)-equivalent) continuously with a high-end DSLR camera, the 256 GB UFS card takes less than seven seconds, compared to a UHS-1 microSD card which typically takes about 32 seconds, at 35 MB/s.

To achieve the highest performance and most power-efficient data transport, the UFS card supports multiple commands with command queuing features and enables simultaneous reading and writing through the use of separately dedicated paths, doubling throughput.

As the leading memory storage provider, Samsung has been aggressive in preparing UFS solutions for the marketplace, while contributing to JEDEC standardization of the Universal Flash Storage 2.0 specification in September 2013 and the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 1.0 Card Extension standard in March 2016. Following its introduction of the industry-first 128GB embedded UFS chip in January 2015, the company successfully launched a 256GB embedded UFS memory for high-end mobile devices in February of this year. As of earlier this month, Samsung also completed the Universal Flash Storage Association (UFSA)'s certification program that evaluates electrical and functional specifications for compatibility of a UFS card, and Samsung's new UFS card products were approved as UFSA-certified UFS cards with the right to use the official UFS logo for the first time in the industry.

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What's the price going to be like and availability? Also I would like to see these in SD form factor as atleast they are much more universally accepted compared to UFS.
 
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What's the price going to be like and availability? Also I would like to see these in SD form factor as atleast they are much more universally accepted compared to UFS.
UFS cards are replacement for SD cards and they are based on SCSI, that is why they have higher performance.

SDXC support is pretty bad so UFS might not be a bad idea, at least every device you buy will support higher speeds.
 
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UFS cards are replacement for SD cards and they are based on SCSI, that is why they have higher performance.

SDXC support is pretty bad so UFS might not be a bad idea, at least every device you buy will support higher speeds.
Adoption across the industry is going to be a big hurdle for UFS, even SD UHS-II support is abysmal at best right now. Atleast there are only a handful of cameras that support UHS-II it's even worse for other handheld devices like cellphones and tablets. SDXC support is pretty good across the industry.
 
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SDXC support is pretty good across the industry.
I was thinking about consumer support, I once thought my microSD card was fake because it was so slow, then I found out that both laptop card reader and external card reader lacked SDXC support. Funny thing is I have about 10 year old laptop which supports SDHC (only under Linux, under Windows only SD support) but relatively new 3 year old laptop still has only SDHC support.
 
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I was thinking about consumer support, I once thought my microSD card was fake because it was so slow, then I found out that both laptop card reader and external card reader lacked SDXC support. Funny thing is I have about 10 year old laptop which supports SDHC (only under Linux, under Windows only SD support) but relatively new 3 year old laptop still has only SDHC support.
Seems like you need to upgrade the reader. I am currently using Transcend card reader(RDF-9) and it supports UHS-II speeds properly, I get read speeds of upto 125MBps on my Lexar 1000x SD cards. usually the card reader built into older laptops are quite slow and wired to USB 2.0 port compared to newer ones which are wired to PCI-e/USB 3.0(though they still support only UHS-I instead of UHS-II). You read some reviews of card readers at Camera Memory speed.
 
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The craze for high resolution video may help accelerate the adoption. RAW 1080p and H.265 4K already use up almost all of the current version bandwidth.
 
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