Samsung is a major manufacturer of microSD cards, but today the company took the wraps off of the follow-up to microSD.
Samsung has announced the first Universal Flash Storage (UFS) memory cards, which come in 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB sizes. The advantage that these UFS cards have over microSD cards is that they’re considerably faster.
Samsung touts that its UFS cards have a sequential read speed of 530MB/s, which is five times faster than a microSD card and similar to some SSDs. Meanwhile, the UFS card’s sequential write speed of 170MB/s is almost twice as fast as the top-end microSD card.
These speedy cards are expected to be good for mobile devices that capture high-resolution photos and videos, like smartphones, drones, 3D VR cameras, and DSLRs. Unfortunately, there are currently no smartphones on the market than can use these cards. While the UFS cards look similar to microSD cards, the pins on the back of the cards are different.
Samsung hasn’t announced any launch or pricing info for these UFS cards, so it’s not a huge deal that there aren’t currently any devices that support them. As we continue to rely on our phones and other mobile devices for capturing high-resolution footage, though, these UFS cards will come in handy.