Samsung has begun mass production of a new embedded storage memory solution that will bring the kind of read/write speeds I expect from high-end laptops to… high-end smartphones.
The new Samsung 512GB eUFS 3.1 offers sequential read speeds up to 2,100 MB/s and sequential write speeds up to 1,200 MB/s.
While the top sequential read speeds remain unsurprisingly unchanged from last year’s eUFS 3.0 storage, the new storage offers up to 3 times faster sequential write speeds. It also has a 1.6x boost in random read performance and a slight bump in random write performance.
Samsung says its new eUFS 3.1 storage is 10X faster than a typical UHS-I microSD card and twice as fast as a SATA SSD — although it’s worth noting that there are PCIe NVMe SSDs that definitely outperform Samsung’s new embedded storage.
Of course, it still makes more sense to compare smartphones-to-smartphones, so here’s a table looking at how the new product stacks up against Samsung’s embedded storage from the past 5+ years:
Product | Sequential Read | Sequential Write | Random Read | Random Write |
512GB eUFS 3.1 (March 2020) | 2100MB/s | 1200MB/s | 100,000 IOPS | 70,000 IOPS |
512GB eUFS 3.0 (Feb. 2019) | 2100MB/s | 410MB/s | 63,000 IOPS | 68,000 IOPS |
1TB eUFS 2.1 (Jan. 2019) | 1000MB/s | 260MB/s | 58,000 IOPS | 50,000 IOPS |
512GB eUFS 2.1 (Nov. 2017) | 860MB/s | 255MB/s | 42,000 IOPS | 40,000 IOPS |
Automotive UFS 2.1 (Sept. 2017) | 850MB/s | 150MB/s | 45,000 IOPS | 32,000 IOPS |
256GB UFS Card (July 2016) | 530MB/s | 170MB/s | 40,000 IOPS | 35,000 IOPS |
256GB eUFS 2.0 (Feb. 2016) | 850MB/s | 260MB/s | 45,000 IOPS | 40,000 IOPS |
128GB eUFS 2.0 (Jan. 2015) | 350MB/s | 150MB/s | 19,000 IOPS | 14,000 IOPS |
eMMC 5.1 | 250MB/s | 125MB/s | 11,000 IOPS | 13,000 IOPS |
eMMC 5.0 | 250MB/s | Â 90MB/s | Â 7,000 IOPS | 13,000 IOPS |
eMMC 4.5 | 140MB/s | Â 50MB/s | Â 7,000 IOPS | Â 2,000 IOPS |
While Samsung says mass production of its 512GB embedded UFS 3.1 memory is already underway, the company will also offer 128GB and 256GB versions later this year.
Huh?
Why does the speeds change when using the same module, but with different capacity?
That doesn’t sound right.
Unless they changed something within the drives between the release (eg 2015 vs 2016), in which case it’s not like UFS 2.0 vs UFS 2.0, but more like UFS 2.0 vs UFS 2.09
Besides, I’m going to take this with a grain of salt.
UFS 3.0 promised a whole lot last year, and largely failed to deliver.
And while eMMC 5 was in the district of HDD and microSD performance, the jumped to UFS has been a shift to SSD speeds. But for the longest time, they haven’t met the performance of SATA-SSD in real-world testing.
Example, 512GB WD Blue3D (m.2 Sata) versus ASUS RoG Phone 2 (512GB UFS 3.0).