Samsung unveils world's first removable UFS cards

Just after Western Digital announced the world's fastest microSD cards, Samsung has unveiled something that might be the future of removable storage: the world's first detachable Universal Flash Storage memory cards. UFS was developed to be a successor to SD cards, offering better speeds with low power consumption, making the storage format ideal for mobile use. SD cards have hung on for a long time, however, as has eMMC storage.

Samsung said its new cards, which come in various capacities from 32 to 256GB, have read speeds of up to 530Mbps, which is more than five times faster than the microSD cards just released by Western Digital. Write speeds can be as fast as 170Mbps. Samsung expects these speeds to be attractive to those who are using a lot of data-heavy mobile applications such as recording 360-degree videos.

Unfortunately, the Verge reported that no devices at the moment support removable UFS cards. The ubiquity of the microSD card format means it is likely to be around for a long while, especially in less expensive devices. Samsung has not yet announced any information on pricing or availability, but given that this is a new technology, the pricing will likely only be attractive to those who really need the speed and highly dedicated early adopters. The transition to the new technology could also be awkward if future UFS slots on devices are not backwards compatible with microSD cards. At least during the transition to USB-C, there are many adapters available to ease the change.