Samsung deals out microSD-crushing faster fingernail flash cards Samsung has released a new format fingernail-sized removable flash card that can handle more data faster than microSD cards. The Samsung UFS (Universal Flash Storage) card has 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacity points. This compares to Samsung’s microSD cards which come in 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128GB sizes. The fastest of them, …
Yeah, and not that I've looked at the engineering specs or possibly would understand them even if I did, but this still seems like a massive fail for consumers. I would surmise that a little thought could have produced a physical format that was backwards compatible with microSD much as USB 3 managed to maintain compatibility with USB 2 by locating the additional pins required elsewhere in the shell.
Of course, that would mean consumers wouldn't have to rush out and get new devices...
Since the pins on a microSD slot are only on one side, it would seem that they could arrange things so if the card is facing one way it makes microSD connections and the other way (i.e. upside down) it makes UFS connections. Or maybe it inserts sideways so facing right is microSD, left is UFS.
I'm sure there will be a way to support both, though I'll bet some phones will simply drop microSD support in favor of UFS support as supporting both will increase cost (probably patent licensing moreso than hardware) Hardly anyone is using microSD as a transfer format to get data to/from their phone. They're using it to expand capacity. For that you don't care that your old microSD cards won't work in your new phone, when you get the new phone you'll buy a new UFS card.
Looks like Android phones are finally going to be getting decent storage in those add on cards, instead of taking a major performance hit for stuff that is kept on the SD card.
This got me smiling
Sammy says these improvements reduce ”multimedia data downloading time, photo thumbnail loading time and buffer clearing time in burst shooting mode, which, collectively, can be particularly beneficial to DSLR camera users.”
Unless your DSLR has the software to use UFS and the right Hardware in it that can handle the speed ir will give to SFA in improved write speed.
Most DSLR's (i.e. apart from the ones the Pro's use) can't :-
1) Handle UFS
2) Have the Hardware to even write SD cards at 90Mb/sec.
3) Some Pro DSLR's already use a high speed storage medium eg, XQD on the D4S/D5
At the moment, I don't see the likes of Nikon or Canon adopting this storage device. Maybe in a year or two but in any event YOU will have to buy a new camera body.
Exactly how much bandwidth does one need for reading/writing video though?
Take a typical high-end microSD card than can read at 90MB/s and that's sufficient to (rounding up to 60Mb/s for BDR) stream eight blu-rays simultaneously, or if we go for the maximum theoretical bitrate of 128Mb/s, five 4k UHD streams.
How much video does one phone need to be able to handle...?
It's not just the reading/writing. Don't forget the moving. If you've recorded 1 hr of HD, even if it can be moved at 4x speed that's still 15 minutes of sitting on your hands.
A pro cameraperson will lament the passing of sd; those days when you could shoot your footage and transfer it quickly to the client...
If we were going to stick with 4k 30fps video, then current tech would be ok. But we're soon going beyond 4k and 30fps. For 360 video, if you want to display at the native resolution of the screen you need to go well beyond 4k, and ideally 60fps or more, that's where we're heading next with phones.
I've not yet heard or seen much in the way of expected power draw on these. Naturally most mobile applications (i.e. what microSD does now such as a music collection in your mobile) don't really demand much in the way of throughput but I'm curious to see how much power these things will chew if you're reading/writing to them at ~200MB/s or more, and if indeed that's comparable to the power draw of your typical microSD card at load and at idle.
At the moment this just seems like a replacement for stuff like high-bandwidth "prosumer" stuff like DSLRs and camcorders, and even most of those aren't IO-constrained... they'll typically run out of puff doing the thumbnailing or whatever else this is mooted for rather than waiting on storage IME.
I paid £150 for a 128MB SmartMedia card in early 2003 to use in a Finepix 6900 (3MP interpolated to 6MP due to a clever sensor design)... I STILL had to have a stand-alone card-reader (with a 2GB HDD!!!) to transfer pics off it while I was travelling round NZ.
The kids of today...etc.
Steve
One of the main bugbears I have about purchasing a tablet at the moment (the ones with removable storage slots anyway) is that you can only get 128GB MicroSD cards for them, and those aren't exactly fast when compared to modern SSDs
It would be good to have something like this for that market, niche though it is.
I wonder if UFS will be better for use as an operating storage device. i.e. for use by next generation devices that replace things like a Raspberry Pi or Pine64!
Given it is based on SCSI and tagged queuing and has faster transfer speeds. Yes it should be quite a lot better. In theory. How much difference it makes in reality would depend a lot on what you use the Pi for.
Looks like single-lane SAS (or SATA, but they make a big deal of the SCSI nature) - 2 differential pairs surrounded by ground pads (longer, to make them land first as the card slides in)
I, for one, won't miss schlepping SD busses across PCBs, if I can just route 2 differential pairs instead. Fast parallel buses are a pain from an EMC and performance point of view.
I'm slightly surprised they didn't just use the existing pads and have the silicon switch modes. Maybe piss-poor takeup will convince them?
Edit: This also gives a route to higher speeds, which was getting untenable for the parallel bus.
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