Samsung announced that it would begin mass production of the world’s first 512GB embedded Universal Flash Storage drive for next-generation smartphones. The company also plans to manufacture a 1TB eUFS 3.0 drive by the end of the year.
Double the Storage, Double the Speed
Samsung’s 512GB drive doubles the capacity of previous eUFS drives. The eUFS 3.0 standard is also rated at twice the sequential read performance of the previous-generation eUFS 2.1 drives, reaching up to 2,100 Mbps. This is four times the speed of SATA 3 SSDs and 20x the typical speed of a microSD, according to Samsung. The sequential write speed is rated at 410 Mbps, which is roughly the speed of a SATA 3 SSD.
Random read and write speeds have also increased by 36% over the previous eUFS 2.1 generation, reaching 63,000 and 68,000 Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS), respectively. According to the company, this is 630 times faster than lower-end microSD cards that can ship with only 100 IOPS of performance.
Industry Begins Move from eMMC to UFS
Over the past few years, the industry has begun the switch to the newer and more modern UFS memory standard over eMMC for both internal storage and external memory cards. Samsung has been at the forefront of this switch, releasing both internal and external drives based on the UFS memory standard.
As the eMMC standard was reaching its limits, the JEDEC Association released the UFS standard to help embedded flash products reach the speeds of SSDs. The latest eMMC 5.1 standard was able to reach only 250Mbps sequential read and 125 Mbps sequential write speeds, while the second generation UFS standard was able to almost double those numbers.
Since then, UFS 2.1 and now UFS 3.0 have left the eMMC 5.1 standard behind in terms of performance, which is why more industry players should increase the adoption of the new standard in the coming years and completely abandon the eMMC standard.
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