It’s not that modern microSD cards are horrendously slow, but surely no one would complain if someone finally decided to make a card that puts their current average speeds to shame? As it turns out, someone just did. Not unexpectedly, that someone was Samsung as the tech giant has just announced the world’s first Universal Flash Storage (UFS) microSD memory cards. Based on the technology used to produce the recently unveiled 256GB Universal Flash Memory, the standard featured in the latest Samsung Galaxy flagships, these new microSD cards boast speeds that even outperform a lot of Solid State Disks (SSDs) on the market.
More specifically, Samsung’s latest memory cards have five times the reading speed of a typical UHS-1 microSD storage device as they can theoretically read up to 530 megabytes per second (MB/s). As for the writing speeds, they’re twice as fast as the current—or better said—previous top tier of microSD cards on the market, boasting the speed of up to 170MB/s. All of that is possible because the new cards process 35,000 random Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPs) when writing data, which is 350 times more than what an average modern storage device in the microSD format does. The Suwon-based consumer electronics manufacturer has currently revealed the 32, 64, 128, and 256GB versions of the new UFS microSD cards, though the wording of the announcement makes it sound like more iterations could be released in the future.
Samsung is claiming this new set of UFS cards is perfect for usage in high-resolution portable shooting devices such as DSLR, action, and VR cameras, as well as drones. Of course, nothing is stopping you from putting them in your phones and enjoying their insane speeds on your most commonly used device. Well, nothing except for the price which still hasn’t been announced but will almost certainly be pretty spicy. For comparison, Samsung’s recently released 250GB Evo Plus microSD card which is marketed as a top-tier storage solution is priced at $249.99 and has significantly lower writing and reading speeds than the new UFS standard. We should know more in the coming months as Samsung is expected to reveal the exact price tags and release date of its latest microSD cards before fall.