Samsung doubles capacity of its UFS

Samsung has doubled the capacity and speed of its Universal Flash Storage memory, announcing what it said is the industry's first 256GB UFS aimed for use in high-end mobile devices.

The update coincided with this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Samsung is now mass-producing the embedded memory based on the UFS 2.0 standard, the company said in a news release. To put its capacity into perspective, one 256GB UFS chip can store about 47 full-HD movies.

Samsung's UFS memory uses its V-NAND flash memory chips and a specially designed high-performance controller to meet the requirements of upscale smartphones, particularly functions such as UHD video playback and multitasking on large-screen mobile devices. It can handle up to 45,000 and 40,000 I/O operations per second or IOPS for random reading and writing respectively, the company said, and it is more than two times faster than the 19,000 and 14,000 IOPS of its previous generation of UFS memory.

The 256GB UFS takes advantage of two lanes of data transfer to move data at up to 850MBps for sequential reading, making it nearly twice as fast as a typical SATA-based SSD for PCs. Sequential writes of up to 260MBps are supported, which is about three times faster than a high-performance microSD card. With the latest smartphones now supporting USB 3.0, Samsung said the faster UFS memory will help to speed up data transfer between devices.

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