South Korea’s tech behemoth Samsung Electronics Co. on Thursday unveiled new Universal Flash Storage (UFS) removable memory card that offers up to 256-Gigabyte (GB) capacity for use in high-resolution mobile shooting devices like digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) and 3D VR cameras, action cams and drones.

The new 256GB UFS card processes larger volume of data at faster speed than any other external memory cards in the market. It allows more than five times faster sequential read performance compared to that of a typical microSD card, reading sequentially at 530 megabytes per second (MB/s) which is similar to the sequential read speed of the most widely used SATA SSDs. Its random reading rate is 40,000 IOPS, 20 times faster than a microSD card.

The new card also boasts a 170MB/s sequential writing speed, as twice as faster than a conventional microSD card. It can process 35,000 random IOPS, 350 times faster than a typical microSD card that can write 100 IOPS.

Through the significant improvement in performance, the new 256GB UFS card would dramatically shorten the time in multimedia data downloading, photo thumbnail loading and buffer clearing in burst shooting mode.

To shoot 24 large/extra fine JPEG photographs - 1,120megabyte (MB) -equivalent - nonstop with a high-end DSLR camera, the 256GB UFS card takes less than seven seconds, compared to a UHS-1 microSD card which typically takes about 32 seconds, at 35MB/s.

Samsung has upped its influence on the memory storage market having introduced the industry-first 128GB embedded UFS chip in January 2015 and a 256GB embedded UFS memory for high-end mobile devices in February of this year.

The company will keep up its efforts to develop memory cards with not only bigger capacity but also faster data transfer capability to change the market paradigm from volume to speed, said Lee Jung-bae, senior vice president, Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering in Samsung.

By Lee Seung-hoon

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