UFS or Universal Flash Storage has become hugely popular among Android smartphones. UFS was only found in flagships and higher-end mid-range phones not too long ago.
But as the technology has become cheaper, it has primarily replaced eMMC across budget and affordable mid-range smartphones as the flash storage of choice.
UFS 3.1 was announced in 2020 and is the fastest storage solution currently available to Android smartphones. But now it’s time for an upgrade.
On Tuesday, Samsung Semiconductor officially announced UFS 4.0, the next iteration of Universal Flash Storage. UFS 4.0 promises significant performance improvements over its predecessors, UFS 3.0/3.1. For one, the new standard offers a speed of up to 23.2Gbps per lane. That’s twice as fast compared to UFS 3.1’s 11.6Gbps rate.
Read and write performance also see a big boost, with Samsung promising sequential read speeds of up to 4,200 MB/s and sequential write speeds of 2,800 MB/s.
Thanks to Samsung’s 7th Gen V-NAND and a proprietary controller, it is made possible. At the same time, UFS 4.0 is also much more power-efficient, offering 46% improved power efficiency over the previous standard.
UFS 4.0 is based on the newest JEDEC standard specification, and while it’s primarily aimed at smartphones, it is also expected to be adopted by AR, VR, and automotive applications. UFS 4.0 chips will come in compact packages and are available in multiple storage capacities up to 1TB.
Samsung says UFS 4.0 will enter mass production in Q3 2022. That means we expect the first batch of smartphones with UFS 4.0 storage to hit the market later this year or early 2023.
UFS 4.0 supports up to 23.2 Gbps per lane, doubled from UFS 3.1. Samsung boasts this amount of “bandwidth is perfect for 5G smartphones requiring huge amounts of data processing,” It expects to see the technology be adopted in VR, AR, and automotive applications.
The new storage tech can support up to 1TB of storage, so we hope that means we’ll begin seeing more smartphones outfitted with 512GB and 1TB capacities.
Samsung expects mass production of UFS 4.0 storage to start in Q3, so we can expect to see smartphones don the new technology towards the end of the year or on the Galaxy S23 series that should launch in Q1 of 2023.