Data Backup Digest

With the race for larger and more efficient storage mediums focusing primarily on consumer-level hard drives, many manufacturers have ignored some of the other storage options out there. One such medium, the microSD card, for instance, has seen little improvement or development over the past few years. Now the team with Samsung is looking to change that.

Unveiled in July of 2016, Samsung's newly designed Universal Flash Storage cards claim write speeds that are double that of modern microSD cards. According to initial reports, read speeds of Samsung's new UFS cards can reach five times that of today's microSD offerings.

For those of you who are counting, we're talking about speeds as high as 530 megabytes per second with UFS and approximately 95 MB/s with the average microSD card on the market today. If you're looking for speed, there is a various obvious winner in this race.

According to Samsung, their new UFS cards are capable of reading an HD movie of 5 GB in size is approximately 10 seconds. This is in stark contrast to the average time of 50 seconds seen with modern microSD cards.

If the read and write speeds of Samsung's UFS cards weren't enough to grab your attention, the new cards are available in capacities as high as 256 GB. Smaller capacities include 32, 64 and 128 GB models. Because such cards are typically used in multimedia applications, including videography and photography, UFS can go a long way in capturing and preserving digital imagery for years to come.

Jung-bae Lee, senior vice president with Samsung, spoke optimistically about his company's new UFS cards by stating: "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. 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 UFS cards consume much less energy than comparable microSD cards, too. In fact, the UFS platform consumers approximately 10% less energy when in active mode and 35% less when completing normal, everyday tasks and workloads. Obviously this is great news for those who are trying to conserve their batteries.

While the release of Samsung's new UFS cards is certainly significant, it's not exactly surprising. In fact, the team with Samsung has been making steps toward the UFS ever since 2013. They've supported UFS specifications via JEDEC, embedded UFS technology and even mobile UFS technology. In fact, Samsung pioneered the usage of UFS within modern mobile devices. While it was once a foreign concept to most manufacturers, UFS is now featured in many popular smartphones and devices.

Most recently, Samsung achieved certification from the Universal Flash Storage Association, or USFA. Doing so has officially won them the right to become the first company to use official UFS branding on their products.

To find out even more information about Samsung's brand new Universal Flash Storage format, including latest news releases, technical specifications and more, please visit their official website at www.samsung.com.