Samsung’s new expansion slot to support both UFS and microSD cards

NEW DELHI: After recently launching the world’s first removable UFS (Universal Flash Storage) format based memory cards, Samsung is now reportedly developing a new common expansion slot that will support both UFS and microSD cards.

Samsung confirmed that UFS memory cards aren’t supported by devices having traditional microSD card slots. With its common UFS and microSD socket, the company hopes microSD cards won’t become obsolete anytime soon.


“The new UFS cards are not compatible with the current microSD card socket. However, we have developed a socket design that can support both UFS cards and microSD cards. We are working with different partners in the industry on this integration for next-generation devices,” Samsung said in a report by Droid Life website.

Samsung is the first to have developed UFS based memory cards. The memory cards will be available in 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB storage capacities. Based on the JEDEC UFS 1.0 standard, the UFS cards are at least five times faster than microSD cards. This makes them perfect for high-resolution image and video capture, and other devices like VR devices and drones.

Samsung claims that its UFS cards have sequential read speeds of 530 megabytes per second (MB/s). This is similar to the sequential read speeds of SATA SSDs.

The company boasts that UFS will make it possible to access a 5GB Full HD movie in just about 10 seconds, compared to a typical UHS-1 class microSD cards, which would take over 50 seconds for the same access. Also, at a random read rate of 40,000 IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second), the 256GB card delivers more than 20 times higher random read performance compared to a typical microSD, which offers approximately 1,800 IOPS.

When it comes to write speeds, the new 256GB UFS card processes 35,000 random IOPS. This is 350 times higher than the 100 IOPS of a typical microSD card.