What is Universal Flash Storage? (UFS)
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2017-05-06
·
1,020 words · ~5 min read
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arguably one of the most impactful developments in storage has been the
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micro SD card with capacities of
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hundreds of gigabytes on a card about the size of your fingernail they've
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enabled awesome storage flexibility in
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tons of small devices that even full-scale home PCS 20 years ago
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couldn't dream of but in this age of SATA 3 and PCI Express drives it is
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clear that the bottleneck of most storage formats is still one that people
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want to overcome and that is speed and
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this is especially relevant to micro SD as these small memory cards are becoming
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increasingly popular as a more primary
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storage device uh such as in a netbook
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or a smartphone or Raspberry Pi well
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enter Universal flash storage or ufs a
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new format that aims to ultimately replace micro SD and although they're
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both about the same size physically and in terms of capacity right now ufs
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promises to be a heck of a lot quicker
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most mainstream micro SD cards have sequential read and write speeds below
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100 megabytes per second and even high-end UHS 2 cards have a theoretical
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cap of 312 megabytes per second one
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direction or 156 megab per second second
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in full duplex with most cards being slower than that ufs on the other hand
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can perform sequential reads at up to 530 megabytes per second which
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essentially matches high-end sata3 ssds
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right speeds will be as high as 170 megabytes per second allowing for better
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performance when recording 4K video or taking large uncompressed photos things
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that are becoming more and more common as feature-rich smartphones increase in
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price and become more widespread and if you're interested in
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using a ufs card for things other than just storing large files such as running
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mobile apps or using it instead of a hard drive in something like a
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Chromebook ufs also has vastly improve
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random performance uh which is usually expressed in iops or inputs and outputs
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per second which is the most important
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thing in some ways for everyday allpurpose use something you can learn
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more about out in this video so the fastest current gen micro SD cards can
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get a little over 3,000 iops in 4k
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random reads but ufs cards can do up to
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40,000 read and 30,000 right ey Ops
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that's not quite as fast as a current mid-range SSD which might get around
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70,000 iops but that is still insanely
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fast for such a small card and several
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thousand times faster than your typical mechan mechanical hard drive so not only
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do these increased speeds mean better performance they might also give us
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greater flexibility with regards to app storage options as many developers
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haven't allowed their apps to run directly off of micro SD cards due to
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concerns about responsiveness and since devs might be more open to having their
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software run off of usfs cards you're not going to be as hamstrung by your
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phones internal memory and you might even get well more value optimized
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choices for your next phone since manufacturers won't have to maintain SKS
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with a bunch of different capacities inside you can just put in your own
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storage add in the significantly lower
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power consumption compared to micro SD which will keep your battery powered up
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for longer especially if you're taking pictures or recording videos and ufs
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looks set to make our mobile gadgets even more useful than ever before though
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you might have to wait a bit to take advantage of it Samsung just announced
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ufs quite recently in the cards haven't quite hit the market yet not to mention
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that there aren't any readers for them however this might be good news for
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those looking to buy a Galaxy phone in the near future especially as Samsung
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has developed a slot that can accept both micro SD and ufs cards even though
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the two formats aren't electrically compatible but regardless of your device
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of choice keep an eye out for ufs cards soon because nothing could be worse then
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your micro SD card depleting your battery while you're in the middle of
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playing Pokemon go could anything be worse than that no it
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