Samsung has announced today the latest standard of mobile storage solution in the form of Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 4.0. The new UFS 4.0 promises to take the performance of mobile flash media storage up a notch by doubling the read speeds to 4,200MB/s, or basically twice that of the currently available UFS 3.1 standard. Meanwhile, write speeds seem to have more than doubled to 2,800MB/s up from 1,200MB/s, although Samsung says it is 1.6X faster. Here, both the read and write performance numbers are for sequential transfers so random reads and writes will likely be slower.
Samsung is able to achieve this massive speed increase thanks to UFS 4.0's 23.2 Gigabits per second (Gbps) per lane transfer rates paired up with its 7th generation V-NAND (vertical NAND) flash technology that consists of a whopping 176 layers. And in terms of capacity, Samsung says UFS 4.0 will be available in flavors of up to 1TB.
Interestingly, UFS 3.1 also boasted of similar capacities so it is possible that perhaps when the technology matures further, UFS 4.0 may allow for moving past 1TB capacities. But for now 1TB of super-fast internal storage should be enough for even the most expensive phones.
Moving over to its efficiency numbers, which is the biggest talking point for mobile devices, Samsung says UFS 4.0 is 46% more power efficient than UFS 3.1 as it is capable of delivering sequential read speed of up to 6.0 MB/s per milliampere (mA). All of this performance and efficiency will be made possible within a compact footprint of just 11mm x 13mm x 1mm.
In terms of availability, mass production of UFS 4.0 is planned for in Q3 of 2022 which means we will likely begin seeing phones with this standard in late 2022 or early 2023.
Source: Samsung Semiconductor (Twitter)