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Data Storage Hardware News Technology

Samsung Unveils World's First UFS Storage Cards, Could Replace MicroSD (pcworld.com) 221

Posted by BeauHD from the first-of-its-kind dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Samsung has unveiled the world's first UFS card that could one day replace microSD cards in devices. The UFS card is based on the Universal Flash Storage 1.0 Card Extension standard and will be available in capacities from 32GB to 256GB. With a UFS card, users will be able to read 5GB of data, or a full resolution movie file, in 10 seconds, Samsung claims. For comparison, a UHS-1 microSD card would take 50 seconds to do the same. UFS cards will be able to fit into a wide range of devices like smartphones, tablets, cameras, and drones, but the devices will need a specific UFS card slot, which could take some time. Samsung claims the 256GB UFS card has a sequential read speed of 530MBps. The random read speed is 20 times faster than a microSD card. The sequential write speed is about 170MBps, which Samsung estimates is two times faster than microSD cards. The random write speed is 350 times faster than microSD, Samsung claims. The Universal Flash Storage 1.0 Card Extension standard is intended to replace the eMMC standard, which is used in low-cost laptops and Chromebooks. Samsung didn't disclose pricing or availability for the UFS storage cards. It's worth noting that Toshiba does also make UFS storage cards, but they have yet to release any based on the UFS 1.0 Card Extension standard.
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Samsung Unveils World's First UFS Storage Cards, Could Replace MicroSD More

Samsung Unveils World's First UFS Storage Cards, Could Replace MicroSD

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  • The great thing about standards... (Score:5, Informative)

    by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Thursday July 07, 2016 @06:18AM (#52461865)

    Samsung has unveiled the world's first UFS card that could one day replace microSD cards in devices.

    Great. Another incompatible storage card standard... Just what everybody was asking for.

    UFS cards will be able to fit into a wide range of devices like smartphones, tablets, cameras, and drones, but the devices will need a specific UFS card slot, which could take some time.

    Of course if can fit into a lot of devices if those devices are designed for it. Would it have killed them to make it backwards compatible with the hardware that already exists? I'm sure it has all sorts of lovely features but is it really too much to ask for the designers of this shit to think about future proofing their designs as well as backwards compatibility?

    • Re:The great thing about standards... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Thursday July 07, 2016 @06:25AM (#52461881)
      What possible incentive is there for them to make it backwards compatible. They want to sell and obsolete as many devices as fast possible, one way to do that is with constantly changing and evolving the standards ensuring enough improvements to make a replacement desirable. Future proofing means lost sales. I don't agree with this strategy but it makes good business sense. Hell they don't even provide OS upgrades for most smartphones.

      • Immediate market share (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Thursday July 07, 2016 @06:40AM (#52461915)

        What possible incentive is there for them to make it backwards compatible.

        Selling cards to the owners of the millions of devices that already exist. Providing an upgrade path will keep people using your standard. By not making it backwards compatible there is a strong risk it will fail to be adopted.

        They want to sell and obsolete as many devices as fast possible, one way to do that is with constantly changing and evolving the standards ensuring enough improvements to make a replacement desirable

        If they want to sell more cards and hardware, keeping it compatible is the fastest way to do that. Even if I want this technology it is going to be years most likely before I have a device that can use it. So they are pushing any possible sale to me out by a long time. On the other hand if the card is compatible with what I have already, even with reduced performance, there is some chance I buy one immediately.

        I don't agree with this strategy but it makes good business sense. Hell they don't even provide OS upgrades for most smartphones.

        I don't think it is good business at all. It think it is a very short sighted strategy that has been tried before and usually fails.

        And the lack of OS upgrades is one of the big reasons why I tend to shy away from most Android devices (with some notable exceptions). While there is a lot I like about Android better than iPhones, Apple at least continues to support their products after you buy them which matters to me at least. (Given what Apple charges they damn well should support them too...)

        • Re:Immediate market share (Score:4, Insightful)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday July 07, 2016 @08:24AM (#52462199) Homepage Journal

          What possible incentive is there for them to make it backwards compatible.

          Selling cards to the owners of the millions of devices that already exist.

          They are already doing that. As literally the only vendors which give a shit about random write performance, they are selling Evo+ cards left and right to the kind of people who are in the market for a faster storage card.

          Even if I want this technology it is going to be years most likely before I have a device that can use it.

          So in short, it will be years before they sell you one anyway. So that circles around to why should they care about you?

          I'm absolutely certain that they are going to sell a certain number of these cards to OEMs as a replacement for eMMC, which is getting a bit long in the tooth. They're not going to have any trouble moving units.

    • Re:The great thing about standards... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Thursday July 07, 2016 @06:59AM (#52461941) Journal

      ould it have killed them to make it backwards compatible with the hardware that already exists?

      Ehhhh I'm just not that bothered about this one. The way I (and I suspect many) people use SD and especially micro SD cards is kinda fire and forget. In other words, there's some device that needs one, so I decide what size I want and shove it in there. Mostly it remains there for the life of the device.

      My the time the devie life ends, the storage size is kinda small so the card usually winds up in a box waiting for an application which will never arrive.

      I odn't always do that, but compared to (say) USB storage which I use a lot between devices, SD cards mostly stay put. So, obsolecence of the format won't really change much in practice.

      • The way I (and I suspect many) people use SD and especially micro SD cards is kinda fire and forget. In other words, there's some device that needs one, so I decide what size I want and shove it in there. Mostly it remains there for the life of the device.

        In some cases that is correct which of course raises the question of why you need to complexity of removable storage if you never plan to remove it. I see people complain about this in regards to certain smartphones (looking at you Apple) but I think Apple and you are correct that in 99% of the cases the removable storage adds complexity and cost for a feature that never gets used. Most of my staff at work has Android phones of one type or another and I can say confidently that none of them ever remove th

        • In some cases that is correct which of course raises the question of why you need to complexity of removable storage if you never plan to remove it.

          I sometimes upgrade, which involves removing it. The thing is what do you do with the old card? I dn't really have a long chain of devices to pass the cards on to.

          • It's trivial enough to use a thumb-drive sized USB reader that makes it a thumb drive, to use on arbitrary hardware like desktops and laptops.
            A stash of old SD would serve me, currently. I've put a debian CD on my USB drive : I had to use dd, else the installer couldn't read the drive it launched from. So over 90% of the space is wasted and I'm out of a USB drive.

            Now, what if we fast-forward several years and you find yourself putting a UFS card into such a thumb drive reader : unless the card is garbage, i

          • Wipe it and sell it, donate it, or stick it in the phone of one of your less geeky friends for brownie points?

            Seeing how as flash has a very finite lifespan it's also nice to be able to replace it once it's worn out. Though there's probably not a lot of people who write enough data to their phone to wear out the flash.

            Upgrades are my big reason for making sure I have an SD slot as well - a new giant SD card is going to be dirt cheap long before I feel the need to upgrade my phone on its other specs.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tomhath ( 637240 )

          SD cards (and CF) are not going to be replaced in cameras any time soon so this new standard provides zero benefit to me

          Existing SD cards are fast enough and have enough capacity for cameras, so yes, a UFS card won't be useful in the camera you have.

          But new devices and applications will arrive in a few years that will require high speed and very large capacity. We just don't know what those devices are. Yet. I'm guessing virtual reality and AI will be involved somehow, and maybe even cold fusion (but that's a long shot).

          • Both are good guesses, but I'd want my Raspberry Pis and similar devices to have something more capable as well.

          • But new devices and applications will arrive in a few years that will require high speed and very large capacity. We just don't know what those devices are. Yet. I'm guessing virtual reality and AI will be involved somehow, and maybe even cold fusion (but that's a long shot).

            First off, what does removable storage have to do with any of the things you mentioned? Cold fusion? Seriously?

            In any case make a storage standard that is backwards compatible with current standards. There is no reason this thing couldn't share the same form factor and work (slowly) in slots for SD cards. They made it incompatible for no reason that benefits customers. Honestly from what I can see so far I hope it dies off quickly.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by tomhath ( 637240 )

              First off, what does removable storage have to do with any of the things you mentioned? Cold fusion? Seriously?

              Same as removable storage has to do with a telephone, camera, or music player. And the cold fusion part was a joke that whooshed right over you.

              In any case make a storage standard that is backwards compatible with current standards.

              They don't want you to add storage to an existing device. They want you to buy a shiny new device every couple of years.

          • You have hit the nail directly on the head for why UFS is DOA! Speed and capacity. It has the speed, but maximum storage is 256GB. This is an exact repeat of xD cards. A new, faster, lager capacity microSD spec is probably just around the corner, that will work with existing cards, making UFS a non-starter.

        • In some cases that is correct which of course raises the question of why you need to complexity of removable storage if you never plan to remove it.

          Because the best-laid plans of mice and men oft gang agley. What if I run out of space and need more? What if my device dies, and I want to rescue my data?

          So again what is the point of developing yet another removable card hardware standard without making it compatible with what we already have? I'm excited about stuff like USB-C because it eliminates complexity (or will in due time).

          What if I just want to get all the data off my device quickly, and it doesn't support USB 3.1 type C? I just got my first motherboard which even supports that.

          • Because the best-laid plans of mice and men oft gang agley. What if I run out of space and need more? What if my device dies, and I want to rescue my data?

            How likely is that? You have been backing up your data right? If you run out of space on most devices (smartphones, etc) it's not that hard to offload some of the data to elsewhere. You're basing your thesis on a bunch of unlikely hypotheticals that are easily mitigated in other ways. I got worked up about Apple eliminating removable storage until I realized that I never once had ever removed it on any phone I had ever owned. I looked around and almost nobody else did either. So I got over it. All it

            • What if my device dies, and I want to rescue my data?

              How likely is that?

              It's happened to me several times, though not so much any more since we got out of the Palm Pilot era. Luckily I only broke the screens of my Palm devices, and they didn't have much data on them obviously.

              What if I just want to get all the data off my device quickly, and it doesn't support USB 3.1 type C?

              Define "quickly". Even USB 2.0 is pretty darn fast. Also how often do you really need to get "all the data" off a device quickly?

              Any time I want to back it up. I like to take full device backups. When I transfer them off of my phone, I take the uSD card out and put it in a reader, and transfer the data off intact.

              • It's happened to me several times, though not so much any more since we got out of the Palm Pilot era.

                So basically you're saying you haven't had to do it in the last decade. I think I can rest my case.

                • It's happened to me several times, though not so much any more since we got out of the Palm Pilot era.

                  So basically you're saying you haven't had to do it in the last decade. I think I can rest my case.

                  You fail at reading comprehension. I've only had to do it twice in the last decade. Since I buy devices with removable storage, though, no problem.

        • Re:Removable storage that never gets removed (Score:5, Insightful)

          by peppepz ( 1311345 ) on Thursday July 07, 2016 @08:42AM (#52462303)

          I see people complain about this in regards to certain smartphones (looking at you Apple) but I think Apple and you are correct that in 99% of the cases the removable storage adds complexity and cost for a feature that never gets used.

          In the case of the iPhone 6S, Apple want from you 749 $ for the 16 GB version and 849 $ for the 64 GB version. Therefore they charge you approximately 2.08 $ per GB. You can buy a cheap UHS class1, 64 GB microSD from Samsung for 21 $ (0.32 $ per GB) or a faster UHS class 3 one from SanDisk for 40 $ (0.63 $ per GB). Moreover, the replaceability of a microSD card means that you don't have to shell more money up front for a bigger device, and you can spend them later if and when the need arises.

          So not putting a card slot isn't something that Apple do to reduce the costs for the consumers, they do it to rape their wallets.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by sjbe ( 173966 )

            So not putting a card slot isn't something that Apple do to reduce the costs for the consumers, they do it to rape their wallets.

            I don't recall saying anything about any savings being passed on to customers. Do not confuse cost to the manufacturer with the price they charge. Those are unrelated. Apple can decide to charge any price they feel appropriate from zero to infinity and anything in between. But since they aren't likely to charge less than what it costs to make the lower bound on the cost will generally be the cost to make the device. The cheaper this is the lower the minimum possible price can be.

            In any case your cost a

          • You can get the Nexus 6P for $649.00 for 128 GB Storage. So, less money than 16 GB iPhone.

            IMHO this is like saying you want to be raped, just not in the ass, and then getting raped in the ass anyway and then whining that being raped in the ass wasn't what you wanted, but at least he was cute.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by wbo ( 1172247 )

          SD cards (and CF) are not going to be replaced in cameras any time soon so this new standard provides zero benefit to me,

          Except that SD cards are not nearly fast enough for current high megapixel cameras when shooting using RAW. Many higher end cameras have abandoned CF and SD cards and have moved to using XQD due to needing continuous write speeds of 400 MBps or more.

          A camera that shoots RAW files around 80 MB (which is what the current crop of high-resolution cameras do - such as the Nikon D800, Ca

        • What's the point? Depends on if you're the company or the consumer. From the consumer's perspective, the difference between 16 GB and 32 GB in SD card form is only a few bucks. From the company's perspective, the difference between 16 GB and 32 GB of hard wired storage is hundreds of dollars.

      • I've got a 64MB SD card here just waiting for... me to care enough to chuck it.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        "I odn't always do that, but compared to (say) USB storage which I use a lot between devices, SD cards mostly stay put. So, obsolecence of the format won't really change much in practice."

        "In practice" for you because you don't use devices where removable storage is valuable. No photographer works that way. Where do you think such exceptional speeds might be useful?

        SD cards do not mostly "stay put" except to people who don't understand their intended usage.

        • SD cards do not mostly "stay put" except to people who don't understand their intended usage.

          While that's true, this is actually about uSD cards, which mostly do stay put. Digital cameras mostly take full-size SD cards, or even something bulkier like CF. uSD cards are used more in small mp3 players, in cellphones, and on SBCs which don't use eMMC — which this is faster than. Implementing removable storage can reduce device return rates and reduce assembly and stock costs, especially with a simpler interface — so this is going to have to work its way into SoCs before it will become commo

        • "In practice" for you because you don't use devices where removable storage is valuable. No photographer works that way. Where do you think such exceptional speeds might be useful?

          SD cards do not mostly "stay put" except to people who don't understand their intended usage.

          So... SD cards do not mostly "stay put" except for the 99.5% of people who aren't professional photographers.

        • Their *original* intended usage you mean - they've branched out considerably since then. I'm a huge fan of swappable storage, but I'd venture a guess that it's a minority use-case for SD cards these days, especially for the less manageable (and more easily lost) mini and micro sizes.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • I'm happy about any little piece of market share that SD gets rid of. SD is a standard for planned obsolescence. You know, I could buy a multi gigabyte CF card for a 2006-ish camera, and it worked, even if NOBODY in 2006 ever thought of CF cards. This is because CF basically spoke the ATA protocol, which of course supported already bigger devices even in 2006.

      SD on the other hand was always jealous about the capacity. They made sure that there is an artificial border on the capacity, and raised it from mode

      • It's too bad CFast never really took off - all the benefits of speaking an industry-standard storage protocol, without the dozens of tiny pins just waiting to get bent. It'd be nice if they had pared down the power connector, I really doubt you need all the extra SATA power features for a camera,etc. storage device. But I suspect what really killed it was that SD was good enough, and considerably cheaper to implement at the low end. Without being competitive on the low end, the economy of scale just neve

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Like SATA, at some point you have to break compatibility because you have taken the old system as far as it can go. There are limits to how fast SD cards can be, due to both the electrical interface and the software interface.

      The good news is that UFS is just combining existing standards. The electrical side is already in use with SSDs and flash memory, and the software side is SCSI which is also in common use.

    • I love the speed comparison, too...

      For comparison, a UHS-1 microSD card would take 50 seconds to do the same.

      How about class 10, or some of the "Extreme" microSD cards out there?

    • Of course if can fit into a lot of devices if those devices are designed for it. Would it have killed them to make it backwards compatible with the hardware that already exists? I'm sure it has all sorts of lovely features but is it really too much to ask for the designers of this shit to think about future proofing their designs as well as backwards compatibility?

      You can't make old cards fit into the new slot because you'd also have to make new cards fit into the old slot, where they won't work. So they did think about this, and they made the right decision.

      • There are lots of good reasons, but that's not really one of them. After all, the SD standard has already done the same thing: SD, SDHC,and SDXC are all physically and electrically compatible, but while you can stick an SDHC card in an SD slot, it won't work. Ditto for SDXC cards in SD or SDHC slots.

        And once you get to SDXC - well that tops out at 2TB, probably enough for quite some time. But it's the communication specs that are the real bottleneck, I think the SD bus has been pushed just about as fast

    • Of course if can fit into a lot of devices if those devices are designed for it. Would it have killed them to make it backwards compatible with the hardware that already exists? I'm sure it has all sorts of lovely features but is it really too much to ask for the designers of this shit to think about future proofing their designs as well as backwards compatibility?

      I won't be happy unless it's compatible with an 8 inch floppy disk.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

      Of course if can fit into a lot of devices if those devices are designed for it. Would it have killed them to make it backwards compatible with the hardware that already exists? I'm sure it has all sorts of lovely features but is it really too much to ask for the designers of this shit to think about future proofing their designs as well as backwards compatibility?

      Short answer, yes [wikipedia.org].

      The interfaces for the two card standards are completely different, just as the interfaces for PCI devices were completely chan

  • So, you can read a movie file (an hour or so of video) in 10 seconds, which is vastly better than the inferior older standards which take almost a minute...

    Somehow, I'm not seeing myself losing sleep worrying about my inferior older devices....

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cdrudge ( 68377 )

      Those minutes add up when you're transferring files on and off of a memory card from a camera, camcorder, or similar portable device with potentially large amounts of data.

      • Sure they do, but this isn't even twice as fast (write) as UHS-II cards that already exist, and which are backwards compatible with (slower) interfaces. The spec for USH-II goes to 312MB/s each way - faster than the write speed of this new option, and a bit over half the sequential read. And older uSD are compatible with the UHS-II readers. https://www.sandisk.com/home/m... [sandisk.com]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cdrudge ( 68377 )

          The spec for USH-II goes to 312MB/s each way

          No, the spec says the BUS SPEED is 312MB each way. Actual read/write performance is up to the chip and is no where near that speed based on any real world review I could find. It's no different than trying to find a HDD or SSD that can transfer at 6gbit/second SATA-III speeds. It just doesn't exist (yet).

          • Real world performance of SATA III is around 600MB/s. My several years old Samsung EVO4 hits 520MB/reads. There are even faster drives that do make out the full bandwidth provided by SATA III.

            There are PCI-E SATA drives that were made to go over the SATA 3.0 bandwidth limitation. And there is also the SATA 3.2 spec that goes up to 16Gb/s.

    • One issue is copying music files on low end SD. It's slow and there's a small pause between small files, so figure copying 2000MB at something just over 2MB/s, while waiting so you can leave.

      It might be a better idea to try higher end SD but that doesn't come free.

  • Useless units - 5GB Movie in 10 seconds? (Score:3)

    by Overzeetop ( 214511 ) on Thursday July 07, 2016 @08:44AM (#52462317) Journal

    Why can't we just use a universal, standard unit like X so we know how many times faster than a CD it is?

    • They did that with older CF flash cards (x32, x144, etc - same as CD speeds) and it left people asking "how many MB/s is that?"

      They did that again with SD cards with "class 2, class 4, class 6, class 10" and it again left people asking "how many MB/s is that?"

      And they did it one more time with newer SD cards with "UHS-1, UHS-2, UHS-3" and it again left people asking "how many MB/s is that?"

      At least with this announcement, it's trivial to do some math and figure out that the card can read at 500 MB/

  • No DRM this time it seems (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GuB-42 ( 2483988 ) on Thursday July 07, 2016 @09:39AM (#52462653)

    It seems that UFS at least gets rid of that useless DRM in SD cards.
    SD means "secure digital" with "secure" meaning DRM. And not only it is an unwanted feature for most users but it also wastes a significant amount of space (10% according to Wikipedia).

  • . . . pick another abbreviation for your product.

  • UFS is needed (Score:4, Informative)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Thursday July 07, 2016 @11:58AM (#52463701)

    For the unaware, SDHC maxes out at 32GB. You then have the option of using SDXC which maxes out at 2TB but there is a problem, SDXC specification mandates the use of exFAT [wikipedia.org] which [surprise!] is restricted by patent by Microsoft. What this means is that memory controller may be optimised for exFAT I/O modes which may result in undefined behavior or brick it if you decide "i'll just format this to EXT4". UFS on the other hand, does not specify even needing a filesystem, so it's more like a SSD than a memory card.

    • Besides the technical issues with exFAT, implementing it also comes with with the requirement of paying Microsoft royalties. That has done a lot of damage to the SDXC format by inflating the price of all SD cards larger than 32GB and encouraging many devices to stick to only supporting SDHC even though the SDXC spec is now more than 7 years old.

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