Samsung announces world’s first removable UFS

Samsung today unveiled the world's first removable UFS (universal flash storage) memory cards, offering storage capacities of 32, 64, 128, and 256 gigabytes, and blazingly fast performance speeds compared to older formats.

The UFS cards boast sequential read speeds of up to 530 megabytes per second - five times faster than the best microSD card, which makes for reading a 5 GB, full HD movie in roughly 10 seconds, according to Samsung. The UHS-1 microSD card manages the same feat in around 50 seconds.

Write speeds also increase significantly, with rates of up to 170 MB/s, which is nearly double the performance of the very fastest microSDs but seven or eight times faster than the cards recommended to non-professionals.

According to Samsung, all this power was necessary to keep up with the abundance of high-resolution footage being generated by devices from smartphones to action cams, drones to 360-degree cameras. However, even as the new UFS standard had appeared as embedded memory in a few devices (notably Samsung's own Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge), there were no products that yet supported the cards as removable storage.
 
According to Samsung, the high-performance transfer speeds make them as fast as SATA solid-state drives and "significantly reduce multimedia data downloading time, photo thumbnail loading time and buffer clearing time in burst shooting mode (for DSLRs)."

Samsung claims its new products took seven seconds to save 24 JPEG images with a file size of 1.1MB after capture from a camera. SanDisk's UHS-1 microSD card would take about 32 seconds for the same task.

According to commentators, though this was impressive, currently there were no gadgets available capable of handling such fast microSD cards. Samsung had also not announced any pricing information or release dates.