Universal Flash Storage, or UFS for short, is the storage technology used by many smartphones and other devices. Samsung has now unveiled its implementation of UFS 4.0, a faster upgraded version that might appear in your next phone or tablet.
Samsung Semiconductor announced the new UFS 4.0 technology in a series of tweets. The company said, "UFS 4.0 offers a bandwidth of up to 23.2Gbps per lane, double that of the previous UFS 3.1. [...] With Samsung's advanced 7th-generation V-NAND and a proprietary controller under the hood, UFS 4.0 will deliver sequential read speed of up to 4,200MB/s and sequential write speed of up to 2,800MB/s."
UFS 4.0 sounds like a significant upgrade over the UFS 3.0 standard that was introduced in 2018, which has a maximum data transfer rate of 11.6 Gbps per lane, with a maximum speed of around 2900 MB/s. That makes the new UFS 4.0 designs about twice as fast, though the UFS 3.1 standard introduced in 2020 included a few optional features that made some devices a bit faster. It sounds like the new upgrade is still limited to two data lanes.
Samsung says its UFS 4.0 chips are 46% more power-efficient than its UFS 3.0 designs, with a sequential read speed of 6.0MB/s per mA. The chipsets will be manufactured in several different capacities (up to 1TB), and won't be larger than 11mm x 13mm x 1mm. Mass production will start in the third quarter of 2022.
UFS flash storage is used in many smartphones and tablets from Samsung, Xiaomi, and OnePlus. Phones with UFS 4.0 will have faster storage performance (speeding up tasks like loading games), and the improved power efficiency might slightly improve battery life. Samsung always updates its flagship Galaxy S phones early in the year --- the Galaxy S22 series arrived this past February --- so we'll likely have to wait for next year's best Android phones to see UFS 4.0 in action. The Q3 manufacturing timeline means there's a chance some premium phones launching near the end of the year might have UFS 4.0, like the Pixel 7 series or next Galaxy Z Fold, but we'll have to wait and see.
Source: Samsung Semiconductor