Samsung is gearing up for a massive shift in smartphone storage capacity. It announced this week that it had begun mass producing the industry’s first one-terabyte (TB) embedded Universal Flash Storage () 2.1, “for use in next-generation mobile applications”.
Samsung Electronics introduced the first UFS solution, the 128-gigabyte (GB) eUFS, four years ago, and has since led the move from standard storage on a handset being 16GB or 32GB, to its current high-end of 512GB. The new version will double the current maximum storage space of high-end smartphones.
“The 1TB eUFS is expected to play a critical role in bringing notebook-like user experience to the next generation of mobile devices,” said Cheol Choi, executive vice president of Memory Sales & Marketing at Samsung Electronics.
“What’s more, Samsung is committed to assuring the most reliable supply chain and adequate production quantities to support the timely launches of upcoming flagship smartphones in accelerating growth of the global mobile market.”
This appears to be a clear signal that the new Samsung Galaxy S10 and its siblings, due to be launched in San Francisco on 20 February, will have he option of up to 1TB of memory.
Read on for the detailed specs and performance of the 2.1.
Samsung provided the following details of the 2.1:
Within the same package size (11.5mm x 13.0mm), the 1TB eUFS solution doubles the capacity of the previous 512GB version by combining 16 stacked layers of Samsung’s most advanced 512-gigabit (Gb) V-NAND flash memory and a newly developed proprietary controller. Smartphone users will now be able to store 260 10-minute videos in 4K UHD (3840×2160) format, whereas the 64GB eUFS widely used in many current high-end smartphones is capable of storing 13 videos of the same size.
The 1TB eUFS also possesses exceptional speed, allowing users to transfer large amounts of multimedia content in significantly reduced time. At up to 1,000 megabytes per second (MB/s), the new features approximately twice the sequential read speed of a typical 2.5-inch SATA solid state drive (SSD). This means that 5GB-sized full HD videos can be offloaded to an NVMe SSD in as fast as five seconds, which is 10 times the speed of a typical microSD card. Furthermore, the random read speed has increased by up to 38 over the 512GB version, clocking in at up to 58,000 IOPS.
Random writes are 500 times faster than a high-performance microSD card (100 IOPS), coming in at up to 50,000 IOPS. The random speeds allow for high-speed continuous shooting at 960 frames per second and will enable smartphone users to take full advantage of the multi-camera capabilities in today and tomorrow’s flagship models.
Samsung plans to expand the production of its fifth-generation 512Gb V-NAND at its Pyeongtaek plant in Korea throughout the first half of 2019 to fully address the anticipated strong demand for the 1TB eUFS from mobile device manufacturers around the world.