Samsung Starts Production of 1 TB eUFS 2.1 Storage for Smartphones
by Anton Shilov on January 30, 2019 12:00 PM EST
Samsung said it had started mass production of its eUFS 2.1 storage solution featuring a 1 TB capacity for smartphones. Apart from its massive capacity, the drive offers a sequential read performance that is two times faster when compared to a typical SATA SSD. Samsung expects the device to be used by high-end smartphones “soon”.
Samsung’s eUFS 2.1 storage solution comes in an industry-standard 11.5 mm × 13 mm package and is based on 16 512 Gb V-NAND flash memory dies as well as a proprietary controller. The drive is compatible with SoCs featuring a UFS 2.1 interface that are relatively widespread these days.
When it comes to performance characteristics, Samsung claims that the drive is rated for up to 1000 MB/s sequential read speed as well as up to 260 MB/s sequential write speed. Random read/write performance of the drive is up to 58K/50K of read/write IOPS. The new drive is tangibly faster when compared to Samsung’s previous-generation 512 GB eUFS 2.1 solution, so the upcoming smartphones will offer not only more storage, but also higher performance. Obviously, any eUFS 2.1 device is orders of magnitude faster than any microSD card.
What is a bit surprising is that Samsung decided to stick to the UFS 2.1 spec instead of adopting the faster UFS 3.0 specification that is supported by Samsung's own Exynos 9820 mobile SoC (and it is likely that other upcoming leading-edge SoCs either do already, or will support it shortly).
| Samsung's Comparison of Internal NAND Flash Storage | |||||||
| Sequential Read Speed | Sequential Write Speed | Random Read Speed | Random Write Speed | Launch Timeframe | |||
| Samsung 1 TB eUFS 2.1 | 1000 MB/s | 260 MB/s | 58K IOPS | 50 IOPS | January 2019 | ||
| Samsung 512 GB eUFS 2.1 | 860 MB/s | 255 MB/s | 42 IOPS | 40 IOPS | November 2017 | ||
| Samsung 256 GB eUFS 2.0 | 850 MB/s | 260 MB/s | 45K IOPS | 40K IOPS | February 2016 | ||
| Samsung 128 GB eUFS 2.0 | 350 MB/s | 150 MB/s | 19K IOPS | 14K IOPS | January 2015 | ||
| Samsung 256 GB UFS Card | 530 MB/s | 170 MB/s | 40K IOPS | 35K IOPS | July 2016 | ||
| eMMC 5.1 | 250 MB/s | 125 MB/s | 11K IOPS | 13K IOPS | - | ||
| eMMC 5.0 | 250 MB/s | 90 MB/s | 7K IOPS | 13K IOPS | - | ||
| eMMC 4.5 | 140 MB/s | 50 MB/s | 7K IOPS | 2K IOPS | - | ||
Samsung did not disclose pricing of its 1 TB eUFS 2.1 drive, but since this is the industry’s highest-capacity eUFS storage device, it will naturally carry a premium price tag and so will smartphones featuring the chip.
In addition to announcing its new eUFS 2.1 storage solution for high-end smartphones, Samsung also said that it would expand production of its 5th Gen 512 Gb V-NAND memory later in the first half of 2019, which will enable it to boost production of eUFS drives in general and 1 TB devices in particular.
Related Reading:
- Toshiba Begins to Sample UFS 3.0 Drives: 96L 3D TLC NAND, Up to 2.9 GB/s
- Samsung Starts Production of 512 GB UFS NAND Flash Memory: 64-Layer V-NAND, 860 MB/s Reads
- Samsung Announces 256GB UFS Embedded Storage Solution
- Samsung Announces 128GB UFS Storage For Smartphones
- Samsung Rolls Out Its First UFS Cards: SSD Performance in Card Form-Factor
Source: Samsung
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
23 Comments
View All Comments
Chaitanya - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
Just in time for Galaxy S10.matfra - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
@Anton typo alert : you missed a few Ks in your tablesharathc - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link
Mr Anton Shilov, c'mon, be more professional man. Given the huge respect this tech website has, you need to be very careful and proofread thoroughly before posting an article.shabby - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
Any reason they're using ufs and not nvme?Santoval - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
UFS is more power efficient and mobile oriented.WatcherCK - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
Is this a 1 chip solution (given the picture above) and if the storage is getting well used Im curious about heat generation within a smart phone form factor (I have not got a reasonably fast SSD drive yet so I do not know how much heat they actually generate...)twotwotwo - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link
Probably single-package, yeah. That "chip" contains a bunch of Flash dies and a controller a lot like an m.2 stick or whatever, but all wrapped in one package. If you search for BGA SSDs, same idea but following desktop standards. (The Toshiba BG4 got a recent post here.)Doubt heat will be a big problem. Fancy m.2 desktop SSDs use like five watts under full load and milliwatts fully idle. Since this is slower and mobile those numbers should be a good bit lower here, and given the usual phone use cases it'll probably spend a lot of time idle and very little under full load.
nandnandnand - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
These are 1 mm thick, right? If so, there could be a 1 TB microSD card in the near future. (2 TB should be easy since there are already 1 Tb and 1.33 Tb dies floating around.)jrs77 - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link
Who needs 1 TB of storage on a mobile device? I've not managed to fill up 32GB on my iPad in three years.Meteor2 - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link
People with very restricted data plans who want to watch videos or listen to music out and about.I have 24 GB of 4G data a month, so am absolutely fine with 32 GB storage. I stream everything, and videos and photos I take go straight to the cloud. But many people can't get such good services.