Samsung Announces 128GB UFS Storage For Smartphones
by Andrei Frumusanu on February 25, 2015 7:55 PM EST
We've first heard about plans to adopt UFS (Universal Flash Storage) with the announcements of Toshiba and Qualcomm reported over a year ago. While the promised late 2014 schedule seems to have been missed, and we still haven't seen any major product with the technology, it looks like UFS is finally gaining some traction as today Samsung is announcing the mass production of in-house solutions based on the UFS 2.0 standard.
Samsung claims to provide the new embedded memory type in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB capacities. The 128GB model doubles the amount of storage even their biggest eMMC storage solution is able to deliver. It was only last week that Samsung recently released a new eMMC 5.1 based NAND line-up which promised major gains over today's deployed eMMC products.
The UFS solution claims to achieve 19K IOPS (Input/output operations per second) in reads, almost double that of the 11K IOPS their eMMC 5.1 solution is capable of, and 2.7X times what common embedded memory is capable of today. There is also a purported boost to sequential read and write performance to SSD levels, although Samsung doesn't provide any actual figure, so we'll have to wait until we review a device to see what the actual gains are. What should be very interesting is a promised 50% decrease in energy consumption. We're still not very sure on the impact of eMMC power on a smartphone's battery life, but scenarios such as video recording are certain use-cases where a decrease in NAND power could be very beneficial to battery life.
UFS is based on a serial interface as opposed to eMMC's parallel architecture, enabling Full-Duplex data transfer and achieving twice to four times the peak bandwidth (depending on implementation) over the existing eMMC 8-bit interface.
Samsung offers the solution also in an ePoP package, meaning the NAND IC is embedded with the RAM ICs in a PoP package on top of the SoC, a solution already employed in the Galaxy Alpha and Galaxy Note 4. The goal here is to save on precious PCB space in small form factors such as smartphones.
We're looking forward to see in what kind of devices Samsung implements the technology and how it affects their performance and responsiveness.
Source: Samsung Tomorrow
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Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
Oh god. Haha. Thanks.2kfire - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
Signed in just to say I literally laughed out loudPlease give the OP +1 internets
WorldWithoutMadness - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
Samsung technologies?Better wait 1-2 years and see whether any problems occurs or you'll get HDD class speed.
SilthDraeth - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLYou so funny!
Samus - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
The slowest 840 EVO I've seen is around 150MB/sec random and 180MB/sec sequential.That's on par with a second gen SATA 2 SSD such as an Intel SSD 320. No consumer class hard drive has less than 1ms access time and 150MB/sec random read.
And what's important is, astonishingly, the reliability doesn't seem to have been affected, so the algorithms that are slowing the drives down might actually be doing their job.
Gich - Thursday, February 26, 2015 - link
I saw it drop to 35MB/s in sequential.Murloc - Thursday, February 26, 2015 - link
mine is doing 0.7 MB/s on some files, but I haven't restored it yet. It's just a year old.3DoubleD - Thursday, February 26, 2015 - link
One of my 840EVO drives has sequential reads as low as 8.8MB/s and large portions of the drive read at ~50MB/s. The problems are very real. However, as you point out, access times are still incredibly fast, so despite this incredible degradation in sequential read speed, my desktop does not feel like it is running on a spinning HDD. This is not to excuse Samsung though, these speeds are far less than advertised and the drive is degrading well within the warranty, so I expect a firmware update that will fix the problem or a replacement drive if a firmware fix is not possible.TechTrolls - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
Sammobile's recent leak shows that the Galaxy S 6 will come in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB options so I think its a good possibility that UFS will be in the S6CaedenV - Wednesday, February 25, 2015 - link
I am a pretty loyal Windows Phone person, but the S5 was pretty tempting, and my phone is having issues with no replacement coming until 'this summer' which might mean as late as October (because Microsoft). If the S6 is as good as I am expecting then I might jump ship for a generation and give Android a try. I really like Windows Phone as an OS... but without availability in the US of a proper flagship smaller than 6" I really don't know what to do.