Little is said about the type of smartphone storage, we discussed the number of cameras, the processor (SoC), the amount of RAM and capacity, but rarely the technology behind reading and saving files.
Most smartphones now use the read and write model known as eUFS, Embedded Universal flash storage, or just UFS, which is coming in version 3.0, more than twice as fast as the current 2.1. In this brief article, I better comment on the difference between these models and explain how this is positive for smartphones.
eUFS, eMMC and their versions
When looking at a cell phone's storage, we tend to compare storage capacity when it is also important to look at the technology they use to come to a fairer conclusion.
As indicated by XDA Developers, The Redmi Note 7 Pro may seem as capable as the POCO F1, when in fact the eMMC NAND (embedded MultiMediaCard) system of Redmi much slower than Pocophone F1's UFS 2.1.
Today's high-end models feature UFS storage, which is far less common in middlemen and input devices. But the tendency for this to diminish over time, given that we are coming up with the UFS 3.0 release.
Samsung Galaxy Fold was to be the first smartphone to hit the market with UFS 3.0
It seems that the first device to come with UFS 3.0 may be the OnePlus 7 Pro, as the Samsung Galaxy Fold has been postponed.
The standardization of UFS is up to JEDEC It currently has manufacturing companies such as Micron, SK Hynix, Western Digital and Samsung. Version 3.0 was announced in January 2018 and brings more than double the performance compared to 2.1. The table below was provided by Samsung and shows this difference well.
* In the lines above the most recent versions
Samsung's latest release, which announced the 512GB eUFS 3.0 model in February. Note that even 2.1 versions are already quite different from older models. Even an older model, in the case of UFS 2.0 2014, can be faster than a newer one in the eMMC standard, as we see in the other table below.
One of the first devices to rely on UFS was the Galaxy S6 / S6 Edge, 2015. The vast majority of photos taken on smartphones that will end up on our Instagram profile are taken with this Samsung model.
He continues to take excellent quality photos that are surprising for the amount of detail captured. Part of the success of camera operation and fluidity is due to storage.
As this is a process where data is written and read in a few moments, I need to have a good writing speed to be able to write the data without waiting too long. Slower technology would also be possible, but the waiting time would become too long, which would make the handset much less interesting.
Better storage technology on your phone means less crashes, faster speed to open apps, faster speed when taking photos and recording videos. An example of how investment in the important area is the newly launched Nokia 9 Pureview.
Focused on photography and with a total of five cameras and a depth sensor, it is capable of taking pictures in RAW, which generates giant files, and shooting in near-quality DSLR cameras. Its differential, besides the number of cameras is in post-processing.
The speed of writing and reading that determines the high performance of a mobile phone.
The problem is that this takes too much time from the device, making the experience much less fluid. Each picture taken takes longer, about five to six seconds, which can drastically reduce the waiting time to check the final result, as well as a faster SoC.
Still, the handset of Nokia has UFS 2.1, which shows the importance of advancing technology and how this is a limiting factor to increase the quality of our handsets.
MicroSD UFS Cards
When storage memory is not enough and you want to be able to migrate files easily on mobile phone exchange, microSD cards are a good option and of course they are not out of the improvements. Samsung announced its cards microSD UFS, which bring flash technology to the small cards. They reach read rates of up to 530 MB / s, without losing to the SSDs present in computers.
The microSD cards have many differences and capacities, being a very annoying alphabet soup, but we explain in detail in this article.
The future of mobile storage
Anyone who has switched from HDD to SSD on a computer knows the difference fast storage makes. For those who play it means textures loading faster without the buggy scenarios, for those in a hurry to use the PC, nothing better than turning on and having Windows ready to go.
What's more, there are also advantages to applications, in short, any computer, even the worst and oldest, takes full advantage of flash memories. No cell phone is no different and this should become increasingly noticeable.
As commented, however fast we have processors, being able to read and write data is a fundamental process of every application and a technology limiting factor. If we want to take better quality photos, have a smoother use of the system, or just plug it in faster, we will have to invest in storage models, and UFS has to show promise.
Source: JEDEC (tagsToTranslate) smarpthone (t) ufs (t) mobile (t) technology (t) gadget (t) samsung (t) eufs (t) emmc (t) oneplus (t) oneplus 7 pro (t) oneplus 7 (t) ssd (t) flash memory (t) ufs 3.0 (t) ufs 2.1 (t) ufs 2.0
