Farewell MicroSD? Samsung Unveils First UFS Memory Cards

[Terry Ganzi]

The new standard boasts speeds up to five times faster than traditional microSD cards.

A new wave of removable storage is coming: Samsung today unveiled the industry's first Universal Flash Storage (UFS) cards.

Though they are the same size as the traditional microSD card, UFS promises read speeds up to five times faster—up to 530 megabytes per second—and write speeds twice as swift.


Available in 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB storage capacities, Samsung's UFS cards are aimed at high-resolution mobile shooting devices, like DSLRs, 3D virtual reality cameras, action cams, and drones. Samsung said its UFS cards can read a 5GB, full-HD movie in about 10 seconds, compared to 50 seconds on a typical UHS-1 microSD card with 95MB/s of sequential reading speed.

The cards "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," Samsung teased.


Western Digital Tips 'World's Fastest' MicroSD Card
But, according to CNET, Samsung's UFS cards are not compatible with existing devices that use microSD.

"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," Jung-bae Lee, senior vice president at Samsung, said in a statement.

Pricing and launch details were not announced.


Read more: Farewell MicroSD? Samsung Unveils First UFS Memory Cards

 

[simbelmayne]

It's strange, that they haven't tell the prices, but all other news are good

 

[DracusNarcrym]

The results of strenuous research! Excellent work by Samsung.

However, I don't think that the microSD format is going to be abandoned soon - perhaps it will remain as a backwards-compatibility option for older devices or as a cheaper option in general.

I also hope that there is some sort of inter-compatibility system developed so that UFC and microSD format storage cards can both be supported by the same device, though this might not be an issue in the long run.

 

[jamescv7]

Now Samsung already gained good impression at all.

Honestly it is already a time to have better speed rate of transfer for Memory Cards, because simply already part of our lives to improve the operation through our gadgets.