Samsung Unveils 1TB eUFS Storage That Could End Up In Galaxy S10
Samsung on Wednesday announced it has begun mass producing the industry's first 1-terabyte capacity embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) 2.1 for use in next-generation mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Could this be a hint of what to expect from Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S10 smartphone?
It is certainly a possibility, though we will not know for sure until Samsung's Unpacked event on February 20, during which it is expected to formally introduce the Galaxy S10 family, along with a folding phone of some sort. For what it's worth, though, the Galaxy S10 Plus is rumored to ship with 12GB of RAM and up to 1TB of internal storage.
Either way, it's a big deal that Samsung has managed to pass the terabyte threshold. It means that eventually we will see larger capacity smartphones, which is an especially important development on handsets that lack expandable storage. Samsung also envisions the higher storage capacity enabling smartphones to function more like a traditional PC.
"The 1TB eUFS is expected to play a critical role in bringing a more notebook-like user experience to the next generation of mobile devices," said Cheol Choi, executive vice president of memory sales and marketing at Samsung Electronics. "What’s more, Samsung is committed to assuring the most reliable supply chain and adequate production quantities to support the timely launches of upcoming flagship smartphones in accelerating growth of the global mobile market."
It is an interesting angle, and it has some merit. After all, recording 4K video and snapping high-resolution photos can chew up storage space in a hurry. According to Samsung's math, a user could store 260 10-minute videos in 4K Ultra HD on a phone with 1TB of storage space. Compare that to a phone with 64GB of storage, which could hold just 13 videos of the same size.
Getting to 1TB and effectively doubling the capacity of the previous 512GB eUFS solution required combining 16 stacked layers of Samsung's advanced 512Gb V-NAND flash memory, and pairing it all with a proprietary controller.
In addition to being more capacious than the previous generation, the new 1TB eUFS is also faster—it is rated to deliver up to 1,000MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 260MB/s of sequential write performance, compared to 860MB/s and 255MB/s, respectively, on its previous generation 512GB eUFS.
Samsung said it plans to expand production of its new storage solution at its Pyeongtaek plant in Korea throughout the first half of 2019.
