Samsung’s UFS 4.0 can make your next phone faster

Universal Flash Storage, or UFS for short, is the storage technology used by many smartphones and other devices. Samsung has now revealed its implementation of UFS 4.0, a faster and improved version that could 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 delivers up to 23.2 Gbps of bandwidth per lane, double that of previously UFS 3.1. […] With Samsung’s advanced 7th generation V-NAND technology and a proprietary controller under the hood, UFS 4.0 will deliver sequential read speeds of up to 4200MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 2800MB/s.

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UFS 4.0 feels like a significant upgrade over the UFS 3.0 standard introduced in 2018, which has a maximum data transfer rate of 11.6 Gbps per lane, with a maximum speed of around 2,900 MB/this makes newer UFS 4.0 models nearly twice as fast, though Although the UFS 3.1 standard introduced in 2020 included some optional features that made some devices a little faster. It seems that the new upgrade is still limited to two data paths.

Samsung claims that UFS 4.0 chips are 46% more power efficient than UFS 3.0 designs, with a sequential read speed of 6.0MB/s per mA. The chips will be manufactured in several different capacities (up to 1TB) and will not exceed 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 running UFS 4.0 have faster storage performance (accelerate tasks like loading games), and improved power efficiency may slightly improve battery life.

Samsung is always updating its Galaxy S flagships earlier this year — the Galaxy S22 series arrived last 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 schedule means there’s a chance some high-end phones launching at the end of the year will have UFS 4.0, like the upcoming Pixel 7 series or Galaxy Z Fold, but we’ll wait and see.