Over the past decade, smartphone technology has undergone a tremendous amount of improvement and massive change . There was a time when phones didn’t even have a camera, but today they all have one, and so storage needs have changed in terms of capacity and performance . That is where the UFS standard comes in, and in this article we are going to explain everything you need to know about it.
Storage is one of the most important components in recent times, and not only in smartphones but in all devices. So what is UFS and what does its latest version bring, UFS 3.0 ? We will explain why this standard is so important and how it could end up being implemented even on laptops if it continues to improve.
What is UFS?
UFS stands for Universal Flash Storage , or Universal Flash Storage . It is a standard designed to offer ultra-fast read speeds, initially for smartphones and digital cameras. The benefits of UFS can be seen even when taking photos, recording videos or accessing the data stored in the memory of the device, since it provides quite agile speeds at the same time as lower consumption , which results in better battery life.
In recent times, this type of storage has already started to replace eMMC memory (used in many mini PCs and laptops, and therefore it is postulated as a potential storage for even high-performance laptops) since it is much faster. Conventional integrated flash solutions, and even flash-based memory cards, are capable of processing a single command at a time , limiting their speed of random read and write access.
However, UFS has a much faster random sequential read / write speed because it adopts the SCSI queue and architecture model, being able to handle multiple requests simultaneously. It has variants, of course, such as removable cards similar to micro SD, plus a rare type of storage called eUFS, which was adopted by Samsung on some of its terminals.
What benefits does the UFS 3.0 standard bring?
In January 2018, JEDEC unveiled this third revision of the standard that increases bandwidth and doubles transfer speeds while reducing consumption. More than a year later, the first terminal with this standard appeared on the market, the OnePlus 7 Pro.
UFS 3.0 is like SSD technology but for smartphones and digital cameras because it has a lot to do with battery autonomy, but as we said, its speed is such that it is already postulated as a substitute for eMMC memory in laptops and mini PCs. These are its key benefits:
- Faster read and write speeds.
- Greatly increases multi-task capacity.
- Lower consumption, which affects the autonomy of the battery.
- It improves the user experience, since it makes everything look more fluid.
When will we see laptops and mini PCs with this type of storage?
Probably sooner rather than later. The benefits it provides are more than evident, and although it is still not up to the standards of SSDs, it is on the right track, and it would only be necessary to support technologies such as TRIM and others, necessary in the storage devices of a PC unlike those requirements that a smartphone or digital camera needs.
By the time optimistic analysts hope that by the time UFS 4.0 is out, manufacturers will start adopting them on mid-range laptops and mini PCs as a cheap alternative to SSDs , something that could happen around 2022.