Samsung’s new Universal Flash Storage cards could eventually replace your microSD

They just need devices that actually support them first

(Samsung)

We all knew microSD cards wouldn’t be around forever, and Samsung has confirmed our suspicions by introducing the world’s first removable Universal Flash Storage (UFS) cards.

The cards are able to offer storage capacities of 32, 64, 128, or 256 gigabytes and they’ll provide a significant performance boost compared to the microSD cards we know and love.

In fact, according to Samsung, the UFS cards will have a read speed that’s five times faster than your typical microSD card, reading sequentially at 530 megabytes per second. A high read speed means that you’ll be able to move photos and videos from the card onto your laptop or PC even faster, perfect for transferring high-resolution video files.

Write speeds are better on these cards, too, performing almost twice as fast as microSD cards. If you do photography that involves high-resolution files or you’re interested in shooting HD videos, these higher writing speeds mean that the moments you capture will be saved to the card even faster, reducing the risk of lag.

With everyone capturing increasingly high-quality and high-resolution content on everything from their smartphones to their action cams and even 360 degree cameras, Samsung says that more powerful removable storage will be needed to keep up with this and that their UFS card “significantly reduces multimedia data downloading time, photo thumbnail loading time and buffer clearing time in burst shooting mode, which, collectively, can be particularly beneficial to DSLR camera users.”

However, this increased power is only actually going to be useful when we have devices to support it and as of right now there aren’t any. Though it's not unreasonable to expect that removable UFS card compatability is something Samsung is considering for its future smartphones, particularly as it already has UFS standard specifications as embedded memory in its Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge devices.

Samsung hasn’t revealed just how expensive these cards are going to be or when they’ll be available for commercial release either. Whilst it’s clear that as far as removable storage technology goes they’re a big improvement, we wouldn’t throw our microSD cards away just yet.

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