Samsung has announced that it is now mass producing "the industry's first 256-gigabyte (GB) embedded memory" based upon the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.0 standard. That capacity is twice the maximum currently available for this kind of flash memory and the chips offer more than double the performance of their predecessors too.
The current crop of flagship smartphones, like the new Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge already boast UFS 2.0 memory which has brought a noticeable shot of speed to smartphone and tablet fixed storage performance. Samsung introduced UFS 2.0 memory back in 2014 and wrote an article highlighting its performance advantages over the newest eMMC 5.1 (and earlier versions) this time last year. The UFS 2.0 standard uses an LVDS serial interface and full duplex read/write capabilities to improve on eMMC.
With the new 256-gigabyte (GB) chips installed, users of high end mobiles/tablets should notice even faster loading and app start up times and better system responsiveness when multitasking. Samsung even goes as far as claiming that the larger, faster UFS 2.0 memory chips will "contribute to a paradigm shift within the mobile data storage market". On devices sporting USB 3.0 interfaces Samsung says that it would be possible to transfer a 5GB file (like a full-HD movie) within 12 seconds. The new improved storage medium's quoted top read speed is 850MB/s, with a top write speed of 260MB/s.
In terms of IOPS performance Samsung's in-house testing results in the new UFS memory providing up to 45,000 and 40,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) for random reading and writing respectively, which is "over two times faster than the 19,000 and 14,000 IOPS of the previous generation of UFS memory".
Importantly the new memory chips retain the extreme compactness of their predecessors, being even smaller than a standard removable micro-SD card.
