Samsung today showed off its successor to the microSD card, the UFS – that’s Universal Flash Storage. And the specs on the removable storage look pretty impressive at first glance. With capacities running 32- to 256GB, the slim little cards are focused on the increased storage/bandwidth needs of high-res capture devices like DSLRs, VR cameras and the like.
Along with the storage bump (though, for the record, the company also showed off a 256GB microSD card back in May), the cards boast some crazy fast read and write times. Read speeds peak out around 530 megabytes per second, which put it at around five times the speed of high-end microSDs.
According the company’s numbers, it can read a 5GB movie in 10 seconds, versus 50 seconds on the older format. Write speeds get a bump as well, doubling the top microSDs at around 170 MB/s.
Samsung’s been working on the format for some time now – in fact, the company already embedded it into some existing mobile devices, but this is the first time it’s showing off the expandable storage version of the cards. Which means, among other things, that you’ll be hard pressed to find any devices that actually read the new format.
Though, with all of the talk around a forthcoming Galaxy Note 7 release, that may change sooner than later.