Samsung Unveils World's First UFS Storage Cards, Could Replace MicroSD (pcworld.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Samsung has unveiled the world's first UFS card that could one day replace microSD cards in devices. The UFS card is based on the Universal Flash Storage 1.0 Card Extension standard and will be available in capacities from 32GB to 256GB. With a UFS card, users will be able to read 5GB of data, or a full resolution movie file, in 10 seconds, Samsung claims. For comparison, a UHS-1 microSD card would take 50 seconds to do the same. UFS cards will be able to fit into a wide range of devices like smartphones, tablets, cameras, and drones, but the devices will need a specific UFS card slot, which could take some time. Samsung claims the 256GB UFS card has a sequential read speed of 530MBps. The random read speed is 20 times faster than a microSD card. The sequential write speed is about 170MBps, which Samsung estimates is two times faster than microSD cards. The random write speed is 350 times faster than microSD, Samsung claims. The Universal Flash Storage 1.0 Card Extension standard is intended to replace the eMMC standard, which is used in low-cost laptops and Chromebooks. Samsung didn't disclose pricing or availability for the UFS storage cards. It's worth noting that Toshiba does also make UFS storage cards, but they have yet to release any based on the UFS 1.0 Card Extension standard.

Comments

FRIST PSOT

[Anonymous Coward]

eat my frosty piss niggers

The irony..

[Daemonik]

If only Samsung would allow external flash storage on their top of the line phones again.

Re:The irony..

[niftydude]

They do.

MicroSD slot is back in the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge.

Looks like they realized dropping it in the S6 line was a mistake.

Re:The irony..

[dimeglio]

Given cloud storage removable storage is a niche requirement.

Re:The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

Given removable storage and finite data volumes on mobile plans, cloud storage is a niche requirement.

Re:The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

No it isn't. Being able to take your media with your where there's no fucking Internet is fucking point, fuckwit.

Re:The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, marked insightful even though it is so wrong. Cloud storage coupled with WiFi access has made external storage on phones obsolete. It is a niche. That's why so many people don't bother with SD cards and normal people don't care whether their device supports SD card or not. Same thing with swappable batteries. Most normal people don't care. Is there a niche market to be served for both SD cards and removable batteries? Sure thing. Some few people have unique needs. Should the entire market serve just this niche? Obviously that would be stupid. Likewise, it is incorrect to assume that the needs of a handful of power users (or tinfoil hatters) is indicative of the needs of the masses.

Re:The irony..

[dfghjk]

As he said, a niche requirement. In the overall market for phones, no one does that.

Re:The irony..

[dfghjk]

Cloud storage provides backup, not a niche at all. WiFi is commonly available.

Re:The irony..

[dfghjk]

More like Google realized how awful their removable storage worked and fixed it, leading manufacturers to consider adding it back.

Re:The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

A quick back of an envelope calculation suggests that something in the order of 100 million people use underground railways in big cities every year. Until those underground railways have universal wifi coverage, that's a lot of people wanting to listen to music when they're out of range of the internet.

Re:The irony..

[jellomizer]

Except for those vendors who try to release a more geeky friendly device. With removable parts rarely seem to make any sucess. Unlike the Desktop PC of old were you paid an average of $2,000 for a system, that you will want to upgrade over time. We are now spending $300 - $600 for a cheaper device that we normally keep for just as long.

Re:The irony..

[rossdee]

What about the Galaxy Note phones
I have an old Note 3 - and I am not going to replace it with something that doesn't have microSD (or equivalent

I want my music on my device, not have to stream it through a VZW pay for data overage plan

Of course if the phone had enough internal storage in the first place... but then it would be too expensive.

Re:The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, my phone plan gives me 1 GB/month. That's down from 2 GB/month that my plan originally offered. But that's okay. I don't use a lot of data beyond occasional web browsing. To get 5 GB, I'd have to pay an extra 25 bucks per month. Streaming my music library is out of the question. Or I could take that 25 bucks and get a very large SD card as a one-time purchase. Luckily Samsung realized that this is important to many, many people and brought it back with their latest line. Sorry, but your claims are ridiculous.

Re:The irony..

[Tourney3p0]

WiFi is also commonly unavailable.

Re: The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you insane? To you travel at all? Travel internationally? SD storage is something I consider to be absolutely critical in a phone. Removable batteries not so much as I can carry a charger that can charge multiple different devices.

Re:The irony..

[bobbied]

Not that it helps you much, but my Note 4 has a microSD slot. I hear the S7 has one too.

What is the latest in the "Note" series anyway? My Note 4 is a great phone (err small tablet) device. Lots of RAM and CPU power to get me though another couple of years, but it might be worth an upgrade...

Re:The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

You say this because you don't do anything important. You don't deal with information that can never be trusted to a third party (e.g. cloud). You don't travel for work. You don't work in areas without Wifi since you probably only go from your fiberoptic wired home to your fiberoptic wired cubicle farm. You also undoubtedly have no concern about governments going out of control and spying on you while wiping their ass with the Constitution. I'm sure that you probably know all about Star Wars and dress up like them too. At some point you have to grow up, be a responsible citizen, and see that your viewpoint is very limited. You really need to expand your knowledge of the world.

Re: The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

For what it's worth, I don't think many people care about having a swappable battery so they can swap it out in the middle of the day. A swappable battery is good for those of us who don't want to throw away our otherwise perfectly functional 800 dollar pocket computer when the battery dies in two years.

Re: The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

1000% agree.

You have to be a complete idiot to trust cloud storage with your personal information. In the words of Mr. Facebook... "Dumb Fucks!"

Re:The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

There may be different attitudes in different markets, but around here I'm the guy whom the technically inept call when their phones act up, so I see how the "normal" people use their phones. Local storage shortage is one of the more common complaints. They're all wary of cloud storage. Half of them don't use their devices on Wifi at all, and none have mobile plans that are compatible with pervasive use of online storage or streaming. Adding a 32GB or 64GB micro SD card and instructing the camera app to use that instead of internal storage usually solves their problems.

Re:The irony..

[fnj]

No it isn't. Being able to take your media with your where there's no fucking Internet is fucking point, fuckwit.

Jeeze, put that knife away. And easy on popping speed.

Re:The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad they still have no removable battery and a locked bootloader. Looks like nice phones, but now that most carriers require the customer to purchase the phone outright they have no right to lock them down, so I'll pass.

Re:The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

You forget that ISPs are also moving to data caps. Nobody wants to waste their data allowance on backing up their phone to the cloud when they can just buy local storage for far less than the overages. Plus, trusting your data to someone else will always eventually result in a problem. Always.

Re: The irony..

[NatasRevol]

The boy who cried 'Niche!'

Re:The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

And most underground railways now have wifi.

So your point is moot.

Re:The irony..

[TangoMargarine]

And how will you get at your data when the network goes down, Mr. Anderson?

Sneakernet is the last backup you always count on. Unless you enjoy living dangerously.

Re: The irony..

[Bing Tsher E]

You're reall digging your heels in about this. Do you work for Apple, or sell cloud storage or cellular data plans?

Re:The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

Phones are used most often when travelling (citation needed). You might have WiFi at the start and destination and any changes, but on the transport itself it's unlikely. Even when you have it on a train it's very poor because it's just a shared mobile connection that gets interrupted by frequent handovers and tunnels.

Re: The irony..

[rjstanford]

Its also reasonable though to understand that phone companies don't see "people who buy a phone and keep it for five years," as a market that they should optimize for at the expense of the "people who buy phones ever 12-24 months" crowd.

Re: The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

do you know the knights who say niche?

Re:The irony..

[Guybrush_T]

Mod parent up. I don't get why this is modded as "Troll".

I was indeed astonished to see that the S6 Edge+ didn't have an SD card slot, given the size of the phone, the awesome quality of the camera (you don't want to store everything on Google reduced-quality cloud) and ... the price !

I don't get what Samsung wants to do here. We don't care that much about speed, we want capacity (that increases over the years so we can upgrade our phone), and phones with SD card slots.

Re:The irony..

[clonehappy]

No, it's still correct. Cloud storage is a disaster waiting to happen on numerous fronts. Just because the "masses" don't realize it doesn't make it less true.

Re:The irony..

[pscottdv]

In my opinion, what has made it SD cards niche is Android's crappy storage model which makes using your external card more complicated than it ought to be.

Re:The irony..

[boristdog]

Plus there are MANY of us who live in a non-served area. I can only get cell service at my house (where I have a cell booster) but the rest of my property has no service.

So if I want to listen to music while working on the ranch, I have to have it stored ON my phone, not in the damn cloud.

Re:The irony..

[ColdWetDog]

You say this because you don't do anything important. You don't deal with information that can never be trusted to a third party (e.g. cloud). You don't travel for work. You don't work in areas without Wifi since you probably only go from your fiberoptic wired home to your fiberoptic wired cubicle farm. You also undoubtedly have no concern about governments going out of control and spying on you while wiping their ass with the Constitution. I'm sure that you probably know all about Star Wars and dress up like them too. At some point you have to grow up, be a responsible citizen, and see that your viewpoint is very limited. You really need to expand your knowledge of the world.

Yep. He says this like a perfectly normal person.

You, on the other hand, not so much.

Re: The irony..

[HannethCom]

You sir are the niche! Most normal, non-technical people I know will not buy a phone without external storage, unless it is an iPhone. They want lots of storage for all their pictures and video. They often ask me how to turn off cloud storage because they don't trust it. If it goes in the cloud, it is because they choose to post it to Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, or Pintress. They do not download to their computer and only delete the pictures and video they don't like. Mind you, most of these people also don't know how to set their phones to save pictures and video to external storage, so unless the phone asked them where to store them they get put on the internal memory until it runs out and they ask me how can their big card run out of space so fast.

Re:The irony..

[Khyber]

UNINTERRUPTED MUSIC.

Packet loss during handoff is a total enjoyment killer for audio.

Additional storage or GTFO. I also want INSTANT access to my music, which a wifi connection will not do.

Re: The irony..

[Archangel Michael]

Lets look at your 800 dollar "pocket computer", in terms of economic value, rather than dollars spent.

800 / 24 = $33.34 / month in value amortized across two years .

Let me ask you, do you get $33.34 in value for your phone, each and every month? My guess, is that you do. Do you use every last feature on your phone, every month? Probably not, but that is almost irrelevant. So, you extend your life of your phone, perhaps a year, maybe by adding a replaceable battery.

815 / 36 = $22.64 /month. So, you "save" $11 month (not really).

Instead of buying a "top of the line" (Samsung/Apple) cell phone, packed with features you you don't always use, you can go for a more middle of the road model like the top of the line Nexus (and avoid the bloat and crap installed by your carrier) for the same "$22.64/mo" you're getting out of the top of the line model, and extra battery, replacing your phone every other year instead of every three years, getting better technology more often than trying to extend your expensive eye candy purchase an extra year.

This doesn't even include options for even cheaper phones, more often.

So, in summary, you can buy a "Name Brand Signature Model Cell Phone" every three years, or get a less expensive phone, with all the things you're likely to actually use every two years, for the exact same money. And trust me, when I say this, in three years, your three year old phone is REALLY old, and tired. and in two years, a cheaper phone is going to out perform your now aging phone that you're still going to have to hold onto another year simply to break even.

So, while you THINK you're doing yourself a favor and saving money, you're likely not doing any such thing, and in the end, in two years, you're gonna want to buy that flashy shiney (since you've already proven that is what you're really doing, buying top of the line model ) and buy a new phone anyway. It is better to not lie to yourself, admit you're being foolish and get a better phone every two years, than it is to hold onto a old tired phone every three.

Lastly, when you drop and break your "expensive phone", or lose it on the taxi ride, or have it stolen out of your purse(man bag) at the club, you'll feel much better if it was not quite as costly to replace.

Re: The irony..

[Archangel Michael]

Don't you mean "Knights who say NI" ?

Re: The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally don't give a rat's ass what my phone costs me per month. I care whether or not I'll be forced to buy a whole new one just because a 10 dollar part stopped working. Your entire argument basically comes down to "Just buy cheap garbage at Walmart and replace it when it breaks or becomes unusable." Or you can buy something good in the first place and use it forever. Yeah, my phone takes a quarter of a second to open a webpage instead of an eighth of a second. Guess I'd better throw it away!

Re:The irony..

[wardrich86]

Everything about the S6 was a mistake. It lacked dust/water proofing. It lacked a removable battery. It lacked removable storage. The S7 is basically everything the S6 should have been (still missing the removable battery, but I can live without it). I actually bought the S5 over the S6 for that reason.

Re:The irony..

[wardrich86]

I own the data on my SD card. I can over write the data on my SD card a few dozen times to make it harder to find. People can't hack into my SD card when it isn't in my phone and steal my data.


Cloud storage is overrated, and way too openly trusted. I'd sooner set up a cloud solution using my home PC. Why don't we have that ability yet?

Re:The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

A friend has got his first smarphone, don't remember if it's running Android 5.1 or 5.0.1.

I think he doesn't care about storage - it's a 5" wifi tablet with a decent camera. No SIM card, no Google account, no apps, so whatever internal storage will be enough (some gigs of photos for what he needs to do) although there's no big reason to not have an SD slot.
He told me the lack of removable battery would be unacceptable.
That is after 15 years of dumb phones, it's expected to remove the back cover and get at the battery, that's all. He knows that the smartphone has very high specs too (1GB RAM and quad core, and whatever high res the display has. $100-$150 price range) so there's no fucking reason to consider it a throw-away.
If a dumbphone lasts a half decade to a decade (if/when you got around to quit losing it every so often), why not this one?

Re: The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

The consumerism is strong in this one. I for one have never owned an $800 phone and will never own an $800 phone, barring hyperinflation. The reason why phones didn't have two SIM slots and an SD card slot until recently was that phones were "sold" by the network operators, who have an inherent desire to make you dependent on their services. In Europe, where phones are increasingly sold without a contract, the trend is to get at least a dual-SIM device, and if the second SIM slot isn't blocked by the obligatory micro SD card slot, that's a plus.

Re: The irony..

[Archangel Michael]

Yeah, that was my whole argument.

The computer I have is from 1995, it still works great! (no need to upgrade, it does what I need) (What you can do is irrelevant)
The 10MB Hub I have is great, it still works (no need to upgrade, it does what I need) (network speed is irrelevant)
The 35 year old Fridge is great, it still works (no need to upgrade, it does what I need) (more efficiency is irrelevant)

There are lots of reasons to upgrade a phone, and the biggest one is ... security updates to the OS. if you want to use Android 4.4 or a version of iOS that is no longer supported, great, use your phone forever!

Strawman arguments are so valid.

Re: The irony..

[jedidiah]

I usually upgrade phones for more storage. I am still waiting for modern mobile devices to catch up to my ancient Archos.

Mobile networks are slow, insecure, unreliable, and expensive. They're like the guy bragging about a 35 year old fridge.

Plus phones are also cameras these days. You want ample room for the new photos and videos you're going to create.

Re:The irony..

[jedidiah]

> In my opinion, what has made it SD cards niche is Android's crappy storage model which makes using your external card more complicated than it ought to be.

Total bullshit.

Re:The irony..

[jedidiah]

> We are now spending $300 - $600 for a cheaper device that we normally keep for just as long.

And it's still just as upgradeable unless you go out of your way to find something that isn't. The modular devices still remain cheaper because the more compact ones are inherently more expensive. "Smaller" is harder and modular has been the industrial standard for over 150 years.

Typically, you have to go out of your way to gimp something.

Re:The irony..

[jedidiah]

> As he said, a niche requirement. In the overall market for phones, no one does that.

It's funny how the conspicuous consumers cling to this idea of ubitquitous mobile networks. You would think with all of that money to waste that they would often find themselves off the beaten path where the network isn't working that well.

That's why I dig local storage.

Re:The irony..

[AK Marc]

They sell more outside the US than in. The US market is perverted with great cellular coverage at high prices. The rest of the world has more metered data. People still use sneakernet a lot. Also, you don't have kids. Load 3-5 favorite movies on a mobile device, and have it around for trips and long waits. There's no reason to even have a cellular plan if you have WiFi at home and sufficient on-board storage.

Your narrow world view is the exception, not the norm. Even if 90% of your tiny circle of friends think the same as you.

Re:The irony..

[sexconker]

Cloud storage is overrated, and way too openly trusted. I'd sooner set up a cloud solution using my home PC. Why don't we have that ability yet?

BTSync

Re:The irony..

[AK Marc]

I was indeed astonished to see that the S6 Edge+ didn't have an SD card slot, given the size of the phone, the awesome quality of the camera (you don't want to store everything on Google reduced-quality cloud) and ... the price !

Then you are dumb. It wasn't about features or users. It was about Kies. No SD forces you to use Kies daily. Samsung realized nobody was using their shitty store or apps. So they tried a move to force everyone to use it. They realized they don't have the pull in the market they hoped for.

TouchWiz sucks, and makes things worse for the user, not better. But to force to use their apps, they removed features to leave their apps as the only way to do things. It backfired, and they are now a "market leader" only when it comes to price.

You don't need to store at low res in Google if you store on your PC and sync daily with Kies Samsung was pushing their own failed apps over Google's successful ones. Samsung is dumb. Rather than riding Google's success, they attacked Google while using Google. The confusing stance caused a massive loss in market share. Did I mention TouchWiz sucks.

Re:The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

..Cloud storage coupled with WiFi access has made external storage on phones obsolete. It is a niche. That's why so many people don't bother with SD cards and normal people don't care whether their device supports SD card or not.

Sorry, but I spend an inordinate amount of time at locations where

a. there aint no feckin' phone service
b. there aint no feckin' wifi

I seriously care if my devices have SD slots, I keep all sorts of useful shit on them, datasheets, reference books, maps and nautical charts, oh, and lots of music..mind you, 'normal people' is not an epithet that has ever been used to describe me (and thank FSM for that..)

Same thing with swappable batteries. Most normal people don't care.

Right up to the minute the things die horribly on them, then they have to pay people like me to replace them..that's when they start caring..

..Likewise, it is incorrect to assume that the needs of a handful of power users (or tinfoil hatters) is indicative of the needs of the masses.

I'm probably in your power tinfoil hat wearing user class, most of my work colleagues (those with Android phones, that is) all have large (128GB) microSD cards in them (usually loaded with music and movies), and these people are most decidedly 'normal'.

Re:The irony..

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

And, for backup(as well as ease of access across multiple devices) it is a fairly compelling offering; particularly for people who lack the skill, resources, or interest to handle administering a file server and supporting infrastructure themselves.

That, though, doesn't replace having a bunch of local storage for caching and offline use; it complements it. Even if cost is no object network latency makes grabbing something from a remote host slightly slower than pulling it from a local cache(unless your storage system is truly atrocious); locally cached data also allow you to make any intermittent connectivity losses(fairly common on wireless networks) invisible to the user; and allow you to do things(like video recording or taking a bunch of photos in quick succession) that produce markedly more data than you can safely assume your network connection can handle for a short period of time.

The 'cloud' certainly needs some improvements in terms of security and privacy; but being able to back up the contents of a client device that may be lost, stolen, broken, etc. and make them available to you on other devices is a pretty compelling set of features. It's just a quite different set of features from what a nice chunk of local storage offers: local storage isn't a backup, isn't conveniently accessible from other devices; but costs nothing to read/write to no matter where you are, is usually capable of higher speeds than your network interface is(unless it is egregiously lousy or you have a really, really, classy network; but cellphones aren't usually connected by 10GbE iSCSI HBAs or anything).

The point isn't that "I want an SD card because I'm a luddite who hates all networked filesystems or network file transfer mechanisms"; but "cache crops up in all sorts of areas of computer design where a bit of storage allows you to compensate for the deficiencies, in bandwidth, latency, reliability, or all of the above, of a bus; and given how little an adequate-but-not-thrilling SD card costs; having a generous chunk of cache to improve the apparent performance of a device that relies largely on wireless connections is an obvious win.

Re:The irony..

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There's also the matter of which vendors have enough market power to push designs that enhance their bottom line; vs. vendors who pretty much have to throw in anything the customer might want because they are nearly interchangeable.

Omitting microSD is very attractive to handset vendors because the premium they charge for moving between storage 'tiers' tends to be exceedingly profitable. With Apple's current lineup, 16GB to 64GB or 64GB to 128GB are $100 bumps. I don't doubt that Apple is using nicer NAND than the people slapping together atrocious unbranded fleabay tablets or impulse-buy USB sticks; but that cost/GB($1.56/GB or $2.08/GB) is roughly what you'd see in an 'enterprise' PCIe NVME SSD(something like an Intel P3700) ; with consumer/enthusiast cost/GB more in the $.50/GB range from respectable brands. And that includes the price of the controller and packaging. If you have market power(as Apple does, since if you want an iDevice they are the only option; and as some Android vendors do to lesser degrees, thanks to having the must-have flagship of the moment, or strong brand awareness, or a telco deal or the like); margins like that make cutting the microSD slot very, very tempting; not because it's expensive to implement; but because offering it will eat into sales of your higher margin models.

If you are basically interchangeable with your multiple competitors, it's a much more sensible thing to include: microSD connectors are under a dollar in quantity one; substantially cheaper in volume, basically all common ARM SoCs have at least one SD or SDIO controller available; and the pin count and frequency aren't that heroic so it's not a terribly ugly thing to route from the SoC to the connector.

Re: The irony..

[PRMan]

We had several Samsung batteries fail in our Galaxy S5s, which are not yet 2 years old. Thanks to removable batteries, I was able to fix two phones with the problem (and have a wall-charger and extra battery) for only $22 total.

Re:The irony..

[viperidaenz]

Or they just don't put SD card slots on so they can rake in extra margin on high capacity versions.
16GB iPhone is $100 cheaper than 64GB version. That's $100 for 48GB of flash space. If the iPhone had a SD slot, you could by a 16GB version and a 64GB SD card for $80 less than the 64GB version, and you'll have 80GB of space.

Re:The irony..

[thegarbz]

Ahh a comment by someone who's never used the WiFi service of an underground railway before.

Re:The irony..

[Locke2005]

Right... because there is ALWAYS a WiFi hotspot every place I take pictures and video... NOT!

Re:The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

It's (mostly) a lot better in v6 then it was in v5 where the SD card was 99% useless. At least with Android 6, I can "adopt" the card in my phone and have it treated like internal storage (fully encrypted).

Not sure what they're planning in v7 for removable storage, hopefully improvements.

Re:The irony..

[Agripa]

WiFi is also commonly unavailable.

But caps are commonly available.

Re:The irony..

[Anonymous Coward]

It's (mostly) a lot better in v6 then it was in v5 where the SD card was 99% useless. At least with Android 6, I can "adopt" the card in my phone and have it treated like internal storage (fully encrypted).

Not sure what they're planning in v7 for removable storage, hopefully improvements.

v6?, v5?, v7?....I know naught of such modern magery!

My phone is running Android 2.3.6, has no problems using the SD card for music and offline map storage/access (currently 64GB, will be 128GB by next weekend as I need the extra space mainly for more offline map storage and future data logging)

My ebook reader is running Android 2.1, gets used extensively every week day, not so much at weekends, and has been accessing the same rather full 32GB SD card for the past three years with no problems, again this card is to be permanently replaced with a 128GB card by next weekend as I've another 39GB of documents of one sort or another to copy over to it that I *might* be needing to refer to over the next 6-7 months when I'll be mostly offline.

(some of us like running hardware into the ground, both the above devices have survived some rather extreme conditions which have 'done for' their more modern and (as proven in the field) somewhat lesser brethren, I'll be rather sad the day I'll eventually have to replace either of them, especially the ebook reader)

Re:The irony..

[wardrich86]

Cool thanks!

Re: The irony..

[Shirley Marquez]

Back in the days before phones had standardized charging jacks and battery packs that could be used to charge a phone, swappable batteries were important for extending the amount of time you could use a phone. But every modern phone has either MicroUSB, USB-C, or one of Apple's charging jacks and can be connected to a 5V power pack to charge.

Swappable batteries are still handy when your phone's battery wears out. Some phones with internal batteries make it easy to replace that battery; others, not so much.

Re: The irony..

[Shirley Marquez]

Why should they care? So long as you keep paying the monthly fee they should be happy.

Their primary business is selling connectivity services, not phones. Back when they were still offering subsidies on phones they were LOSING money when they sold you a new phone. Sometimes they still offer deals where they sell you a phone (or multiple phones) at a loss if you are willing to commit to using their services for a while.

From their point of view, the main benefit of selling you a new phone is that you're likely to consume more data with the newer and faster device.

Re: The irony..

[Shirley Marquez]

It may not quite match your Archos, but my 64GB ZenFone 2 plus a 128GB MicroSD card isn't shabby. (The 200GB MicroSD cards from SanDisk are too rich for my blood.) If I had waited a few more months I could have bought the 128GB version of the phone and had 256GB total.

Re:The irony..

[Shirley Marquez]

Heck, why not 128GB if the phone will accept it? They're only $30 now. Older phones may be limited to 32GB because they don't have SDXC support.

Re: The irony..

[cthulhu11]

Why are you pretending that one can't just spend $79 for a battery replacement ? Cheaper phones mean dicking with Android. I have better things to do with my time.

Re: The irony..

[beastofburdon]

Wow, you have truly taken planned obsolescence in and made it part of your very identity. You are what is wrong in the world.

The great thing about standards...

[sjbe]

Samsung has unveiled the world's first UFS card that could one day replace microSD cards in devices.

Great. Another incompatible storage card standard... Just what everybody was asking for.

UFS cards will be able to fit into a wide range of devices like smartphones, tablets, cameras, and drones, but the devices will need a specific UFS card slot, which could take some time.

Of course if can fit into a lot of devices if those devices are designed for it. Would it have killed them to make it backwards compatible with the hardware that already exists? I'm sure it has all sorts of lovely features but is it really too much to ask for the designers of this shit to think about future proofing their designs as well as backwards compatibility?

Re:The great thing about standards...

[bloodhawk]

What possible incentive is there for them to make it backwards compatible. They want to sell and obsolete as many devices as fast possible, one way to do that is with constantly changing and evolving the standards ensuring enough improvements to make a replacement desirable. Future proofing means lost sales. I don't agree with this strategy but it makes good business sense. Hell they don't even provide OS upgrades for most smartphones.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Anonymous Coward]

Samsung has unveiled the world's first UFS card that could one day replace microSD cards in devices.

Great. Another incompatible storage card standard... Just what everybody was asking for.

UFS cards will be able to fit into a wide range of devices like smartphones, tablets, cameras, and drones, but the devices will need a specific UFS card slot, which could take some time.

Of course if can fit into a lot of devices if those devices are designed for it. Would it have killed them to make it backwards compatible with the hardware that already exists? I'm sure it has all sorts of lovely features but is it really too much to ask for the designers of this shit to think about future proofing their designs as well as backwards compatibility?

Looking at the pictures of the Samsung UFS card underside, it rather looks like the card dimensions would be able to support UFS and SD pins (but not UHS-II). The cards in question only have pins for UFS. That is assuming the mechanical dimensions for the cards are identical.

Or it's possible that it's only meant to support a reader slot that can read both.

Link to the picture

Re:The great thing about standards...

[serviscope_minor]

ould it have killed them to make it backwards compatible with the hardware that already exists?

Ehhhh I'm just not that bothered about this one. The way I (and I suspect many) people use SD and especially micro SD cards is kinda fire and forget. In other words, there's some device that needs one, so I decide what size I want and shove it in there. Mostly it remains there for the life of the device.

My the time the devie life ends, the storage size is kinda small so the card usually winds up in a box waiting for an application which will never arrive.

I odn't always do that, but compared to (say) USB storage which I use a lot between devices, SD cards mostly stay put. So, obsolecence of the format won't really change much in practice.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Anonymous Coward]

The incentive is losing multi-millions of R&D trying to make themselves an industry standard, remember Sony's proprietary memory cards? Not saying this won't be the standard 10 years from now, but we've already cycled through SmartMedia, CompactFlash, three sizes of SD cards, Sony's, and I'm sure I've missed some. But at some point people will look at the 10 64GB SD cards they already have and decide they're good, thanks anyway.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[NotInHere]

I'm happy about any little piece of market share that SD gets rid of. SD is a standard for planned obsolescence. You know, I could buy a multi gigabyte CF card for a 2006-ish camera, and it worked, even if NOBODY in 2006 ever thought of CF cards. This is because CF basically spoke the ATA protocol, which of course supported already bigger devices even in 2006.

SD on the other hand was always jealous about the capacity. They made sure that there is an artificial border on the capacity, and raised it from model to model. Tons of sdhxdhc BS requiring you to buy new cameras each couple of years if you wanted to benefit from improvements of storage card technology.

I don't know where UFS stands, but I do think that anything that harms SD is good.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Anonymous Coward]

Great. Another incompatible storage card standard... Just what everybody was asking for.

Actually, the read/write speed of a MicroSD is a huge factor holding the Raspberry PI back as a desktop alternative. I've been hoping for a SATA port, but this will do nicely.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[AmiMoJo]

Like SATA, at some point you have to break compatibility because you have taken the old system as far as it can go. There are limits to how fast SD cards can be, due to both the electrical interface and the software interface.

The good news is that UFS is just combining existing standards. The electrical side is already in use with SSDs and flash memory, and the software side is SCSI which is also in common use.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[JoeMerchant]

I love the speed comparison, too...

For comparison, a UHS-1 microSD card would take 50 seconds to do the same.

How about class 10, or some of the "Extreme" microSD cards out there?

Re:The great thing about standards...

[JoeMerchant]

I've got a 64MB SD card here just waiting for... me to care enough to chuck it.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[drinkypoo]

Of course if can fit into a lot of devices if those devices are designed for it. Would it have killed them to make it backwards compatible with the hardware that already exists? I'm sure it has all sorts of lovely features but is it really too much to ask for the designers of this shit to think about future proofing their designs as well as backwards compatibility?

You can't make old cards fit into the new slot because you'd also have to make new cards fit into the old slot, where they won't work. So they did think about this, and they made the right decision.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[dfghjk]

"I odn't always do that, but compared to (say) USB storage which I use a lot between devices, SD cards mostly stay put. So, obsolecence of the format won't really change much in practice."

"In practice" for you because you don't use devices where removable storage is valuable. No photographer works that way. Where do you think such exceptional speeds might be useful?

SD cards do not mostly "stay put" except to people who don't understand their intended usage.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[houghi]

In phones that is true. Where I can see this being implemented is in DSLR and other cameras that need that high speed and high capacit and they will still be exchanged all the time.

And they already have cards they use only for their cameras.So buying a new camera could mean buying new cards with the disadvantage that they can't be used in your older camera.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[BradleyUffner]

What possible incentive is there for them to make it backwards compatible.

Actually selling some of these cards instead of it becoming a forgotten footnote in the history of storage devices.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, the whole SD protocol is asking to be replace for a few years, now. It is slow, CPU-intensive as all crap (or you need to add a *smart* SD controller to *try* to make it less of a burden), very fragile (as in "causes data corruption if the clock is off by a few percent"), and very unsafe and hard to extend (using SD-IO is a utter pain).

Good riddance to that thing.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[dunkelfalke]

UHS-1 has the same minimum specs as class 10.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Anonymous Coward]

UHS-1 is equivalent to Class 10 in terms of sustained transfer rate.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[cdrudge]

UHS-I is equivalent to Class 10 speeds.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Anonymous Coward]

Samsung has unveiled the world's first UFS card that could one day replace microSD cards in devices.

Great. Another incompatible storage card standard... Just what everybody was asking for.

UFS cards will be able to fit into a wide range of devices like smartphones, tablets, cameras, and drones, but the devices will need a specific UFS card slot, which could take some time.

Of course if can fit into a lot of devices if those devices are designed for it. Would it have killed them to make it backwards compatible with the hardware that already exists? I'm sure it has all sorts of lovely features but is it really too much to ask for the designers of this shit to think about future proofing their designs as well as backwards compatibility?

best offers on samsung mobile

Re:The great thing about standards...

[drinkypoo]

SD cards do not mostly "stay put" except to people who don't understand their intended usage.

While that's true, this is actually about uSD cards, which mostly do stay put. Digital cameras mostly take full-size SD cards, or even something bulkier like CF. uSD cards are used more in small mp3 players, in cellphones, and on SBCs which don't use eMMC — which this is faster than. Implementing removable storage can reduce device return rates and reduce assembly and stock costs, especially with a simpler interface — so this is going to have to work its way into SoCs before it will become common. MMC requires ten signal pins, while UFS (which is electrically based on M-PHY) only requires four.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Anonymous Coward]

The technology in the SD cards is almost 20 years old now, going from when the MMC cards were launched, solid state storage products have come a very long way, and the MMC/SD card line has (mostly) maintained backwards compatibility over that time.

(To put this into perspective, GoldenEye was released on the N64, and the Sega Genesis/Megadrive was discontinued the same year).

Clearly quite a few manufacturers think that it may be time to start over with a clean slate.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have one too and it's actually useful to me. It goes into a dumb phone, a modern dumb phone from 2013 that has micro USB and micro SD (and a FM radio, and the most useless camera you've ever seen).
The built-in storage is extremely small, no idea what its size but only like dozens KB are left, the rest taken by the firmware. It's set to require SD to add your own ringtone in mp3 or wav format. (The built-in tone is nasty and noisy, good for the alarm clock)

In an emergency I guess I could put some pdf and jpeg/tiff in there if I had to carry them to a small print shop ; the phone is a USB 1.1 storage device.
No internet support (not even GPRS and WAP), week-long battery life and charges over 500mA USB. Win-win-win.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[JoeMerchant]

Thanks, it's hard to keep up...

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Anonymous Coward]

The long tail of the market is rarely a successful business enterprise.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[jimbolauski]

Of course if can fit into a lot of devices if those devices are designed for it. Would it have killed them to make it backwards compatible with the hardware that already exists? I'm sure it has all sorts of lovely features but is it really too much to ask for the designers of this shit to think about future proofing their designs as well as backwards compatibility?

I won't be happy unless it's compatible with an 8 inch floppy disk.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[serviscope_minor]

"In practice" for you because you don't use devices where removable storage is valuable. No photographer works that way. Where do you think such exceptional speeds might be useful?

SD cards do not mostly "stay put" except to people who don't understand their intended usage.

So... SD cards do not mostly "stay put" except for the 99.5% of people who aren't professional photographers.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Anonymous Coward]

What possible incentive is there for them to make it backwards compatible. They want to sell and obsolete as many devices as fast possible, one way to do that is with constantly changing and evolving the standards ensuring enough improvements to make a replacement desirable.

Yes, because they've studied the history of the Sony Memory Stick?
Sony destroyed the competition, didn't they?

Re:The great thing about standards...

[jellomizer]

Ah to be back in the mid-1990s where Microsoft was the ultimate king.
Every PC had a 3 1/2 Floppy Disk which was DOS formatted. And every OS read that DOS format.
Then that 1.44MB just wasn't enough... We had some funky stuff like Zip Drives. Than the Writable CD came out in the late 1990's which was good for a while, however it is rather difficult to expand on.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Immerman]

Their *original* intended usage you mean - they've branched out considerably since then. I'm a huge fan of swappable storage, but I'd venture a guess that it's a minority use-case for SD cards these days, especially for the less manageable (and more easily lost) mini and micro sizes.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[DRJlaw]

Of course if can fit into a lot of devices if those devices are designed for it. Would it have killed them to make it backwards compatible with the hardware that already exists? I'm sure it has all sorts of lovely features but is it really too much to ask for the designers of this shit to think about future proofing their designs as well as backwards compatibility?

Short answer, yes.

The interfaces for the two card standards are completely different, just as the interfaces for PCI devices were completely changed electrically to PCI-e to increase speeds, and just as the interfaces for ATA and SCSI were completely changed electrically to SATA and SAS to increase speeds.

If you're happy with a 50 MHz, 4 lane parallel bus for I/O, go nuts. Nobody is going to stop selling SD cards anytime soon. But exotic encoding schemes will only take you so far. UFS starts, with a single lane, at 362MB/sec -- faster than the HD312 mode in UHS-II.

You may as well pine for UDMA (ATA Mode 6) SSDs because NVME M.2 is "just what everybody was asking for" and "Would it have killed them to make it backwards compatible with the hardware that already exists?" You have storage compatible with the hardware that already exists -- for the new hardware, such as 4K and 8K video recording devices, that storage really does not cut it.

The SD card format is 17 years old. They future-proofed the horse until it finally fell over and died of old age. You might finally have to accept the transition to an automobile.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Archangel Michael]

SATA support ALSO needs to go away. The new SSD drives are already starting to exceed the speed limits of that format, which is why you see lame things like the M2 format in places.

With the death of Spinning drives coming shortly, we need new extensible standards that can take us the next 20 years or so.

Backwards compatibility ultimately holds us back when the technology is at the end of the line. Capacity and Speed are pushing us beyond what 20 year old standards like SATA can do for us.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Immerman]

It's too bad CFast never really took off - all the benefits of speaking an industry-standard storage protocol, without the dozens of tiny pins just waiting to get bent. It'd be nice if they had pared down the power connector, I really doubt you need all the extra SATA power features for a camera,etc. storage device. But I suspect what really killed it was that SD was good enough, and considerably cheaper to implement at the low end. Without being competitive on the low end, the economy of scale just never really kicked in. Plus the whole physical dimensions thing - you're not putting a CFast card in a phone,etc. where every gram and millimeter counts, so there's all that production volume lost as well.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Immerman]

There are lots of good reasons, but that's not really one of them. After all, the SD standard has already done the same thing: SD, SDHC,and SDXC are all physically and electrically compatible, but while you can stick an SDHC card in an SD slot, it won't work. Ditto for SDXC cards in SD or SDHC slots.

And once you get to SDXC - well that tops out at 2TB, probably enough for quite some time. But it's the communication specs that are the real bottleneck, I think the SD bus has been pushed just about as fast as it can go. And once you have to upgrade the bus... well then the question becomes, is it cheaper to design backwards compatibility into the new bus and socket, or discard backwards compatibility altogether and just include both slots in "transitional" devices?

And then of course there's the minor legal detail that UFS is a Samsung interface, and I really doubt they have any interest in embedding all sorts of SD Alliance patents into their own interface, even if the SDA were willing. You'd then be having to pay royalties to both groups for every UFS device, regardless of whether it would ever see an SD card in its life.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[drinkypoo]

And then of course there's the minor legal detail that UFS is a Samsung interface, and I really doubt they have any interest in embedding all sorts of SD Alliance patents into their own interface, even if the SDA were willing.

Except it's not really a Samsung interface, as it's based on other people's technologies and anyone can implement it. They are responsible for neither the electrical interface nor the protocol.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Blaskowicz]

Agreed, but you're taking 2.9 Gbps and getting 362MB/s. With 8b/10b encoding, it's rather 290MB/s, which is the speed UFS start at indeed. That's decimal MB too but we're used to that regarding bus speeds.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[bill_mcgonigle]

Would it have killed them to make it backwards compatible with the hardware that already exists?

It would have killed the market, yeah. I don't want a new card that uses the same interface as the old card - I want faster card interfaces. You can't just plug a SAS SSD into an MFM controller and expect to get high-speed data transfers. Technology moves on. Nobody is refusing to release SDHC cards that can use some hidden potential of the eMMC interfaces.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[AK Marc]

SD cards do not mostly "stay put" except to people who don't understand their intended usage.

In phones with removable batteries, the SD card is generally hidden next to the SIM and requires moving the battery to get to it. So you can't swap while the phone is usable at all. Most find that inconvenient, and don't do it because it's too much trouble. Same for the ones with the non-swappable battery. You have to pull the SIM to get to the SD card. So your "phone" isn't, so long as the SD card is out.

Compare that to a camera/PC setup. The camera ejects the SD card easily while powered up. All features, except storage, still work. Hot swap into and out of the PC, and pop back in the camera that's still working. Though, for anyone doing that much movement of data, they use a cable, rather than a card. So the card stays in place.

At this point, it looks like SD cards move quite rarely. Single load of your music collection, then pop it in and leave it for a few years.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[chihowa]

Most recent laptops and even many desktops have SD slots and will boot from an SD card, so I put recovery tools on these old cards and either carry a few in my bag or tape them to the inside of the cases. 64 MB may be a bit small for that, though.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[DRJlaw]

You cannot assume that that the reported data rate (slide 7) is decreased due to 8b/10b encoding.

As in gigabit ethernet, the media appears to be reporting a data rate where the signalling rate would be ((10b/8b)-1) higher (e.g., in gigabit ethernet, 1.25 Gbps). That being said, it could easily be the reverse and people are mistakenly reporting the signalling rate as a data rate.

I don't work in this area, so I can't say. I've gotten as close to an "official" source as I can in the first link.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Anonymous Coward]

And then of course there's the minor legal detail that UFS is a Samsung interface

The physical layer is a JEDEC standard. The logical layer is a subset of SAS. Which of those is "a Samsung interface"?

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Blaskowicz]

I see, it says data rate.
So it may well be your version.
Notably, Serial ATA advertise signaling rate (1.5 Gbps, 3 Gbps and 6 Gbps) which you divide by 10 for accurate MB/s numbers. With a bit of protocol stuff and inefficiency that gives you SSDs topping out around 550MB/s or a bit more.

Not sure if it's a matter of area of work, or if it's up to a given consortium to choose one or the other figure, no matter what it's about.
PCIe gives numbers in "GT/s" so you know that you have to multiply by the encoding and the number of "X". GDDR5 memory etc. seems to be given out in data rate Gbps. Here I might have got a bit too cynical.

Re:The great thing about standards...

[nateman1352]

Would it have killed them to make it backwards compatible with the hardware that already exists?

Speaking from a purely technical standpoint, based on the way the eMMC and UFS standards are written that would be extremely difficult to achieve. The UFS standard actually uses a MIPI M-PHY design for the actual electrical conveyance of data across the copper data lines. The protocol layer of UFS is actually identical to NVMe and the OS storage drivers interact with the UFS device as if it were a NVMe SSD. By comparison, SD cards have their own proprietary bus format that is derived from MultiMediaCard, which was derived from the SPI bus protocol, which was derived from I2C. This is a completely different hardware and software stack from UFS.

Really what it comes down to is when the UFS specification was originally written it was intended to be an internal bus for giving smartphones faster internal flash. It was not intended to become and external card format that would compete with SD. If that was a consideration from the start, I'm sure JEDEC would have baked a good backwards compatibility story in to the standard. Now that the standard already exists UFS v2.0 needs to be backwards compatible with UFS v1.0, so it is too late to add SD bus compatibility since v1.0 already exists in the market and backwards compatibility with it must be maintained.

Maybe they could try to bake in some SD compatibility without breaking the ability of new cards to work with old UFS hosts after the fact... but given how orthogonal the two designs are that would likely add an unacceptable amount of complexity to the flash chip's controller (remember complexity == more transistors == more expensive controller and more power consumed.)

Re:The great thing about standards...

[Chrontius]

Chuck it in an envelope and send it over here. I can still make good use of it. :p

Re:The great thing about standards...

[psm321]

In phones with removable batteries, the SD card is generally hidden next to the SIM and requires moving the battery to get to it. So you can't swap while the phone is usable at all.

Sorry, but that's just plain not true. I've had 3 different smartphones with removable battery and SD (holding off on getting another because those features are so hard to find now). In exactly 0 of them did you have to remove the battery or SIM to change the SD card. To change the SIM card, yes; to change the SD card, no. (On the last 2 you do have to remove the back cover -- snap-off -- but not the battery)

Fuck a new flash standard...

[Anonymous Coward]

The benefit to uSD is that it is backwards compatible to SPI flash by just hooking up to the right pins and clocking it accordingly.

If I'm not going to do that, then what benefit does this standard offer over an internal Type-C port, the next iteration of uSD, mini/micro-SATA, NG.4(??), or CompactFlash?

Seriously. CF gives you IDE support, uSD gives you SPI support, NG.4 gives you PCIe x4 support, and USB Type-C gives you up to 10 megabit USB support. Any price, space, and performance level is already covered. And most of those standards already have converters between them.

Re:Fuck a new flash standard...

[dfghjk]

"The benefit to uSD is that it is backwards compatible to SPI flash by just hooking up to the right pins and clocking it accordingly."

But SPI sucks and that's not the "benefit" of uSD AT ALL. UFS is built on an industry standard, just a newer, better one that isn't SPI.

"If I'm not going to do that, then what benefit does this standard offer over an internal Type-C port, the next iteration of uSD, mini/micro-SATA, NG.4(??), or CompactFlash?"

It is removal storage that is much smaller than SATA, USB, and CF devices. Duh. Next iteration of uSD? What is that? It is probably not better than imaginary future products that you dream up.

"Seriously. CF gives you IDE support, uSD gives you SPI support, NG.4 gives you PCIe x4 support, and USB Type-C gives you up to 10 megabit USB support. Any price, space, and performance level is already covered. And most of those standards already have converters between them."

Of those, only uSD offers the form factor that this standard targets and it is stuck with low speeds and a terrible protocol that has no error correction or detection. It appears ultimately that your complaint is that they didn't use some PCIe derivative instead. Why should you care?

Re:Fuck a new flash standard...

[drinkypoo]

It appears ultimately that your complaint is that they didn't use some PCIe derivative instead. Why should you care?

Actually, there is a good reason to care. 2 lanes of PCIe (let alone the maximum 4 lanes of NVMe) would be a lot faster than the 4-wire M-KEY interface used by UFS, and it would be a more common interface where he apparently wants to use it. However, for people like him, there is M.2. This is actually for SoC-based hardware, where the ultimate maximum performance is not required.

"universal" in the name is no guarantee

[Anonymous Coward]

Just look at "USB". As soon as you look too closely, the quirks jump at you like fleas from a many dog.

Immediate market share

[sjbe]

What possible incentive is there for them to make it backwards compatible.

Selling cards to the owners of the millions of devices that already exist. Providing an upgrade path will keep people using your standard. By not making it backwards compatible there is a strong risk it will fail to be adopted.

They want to sell and obsolete as many devices as fast possible, one way to do that is with constantly changing and evolving the standards ensuring enough improvements to make a replacement desirable

If they want to sell more cards and hardware, keeping it compatible is the fastest way to do that. Even if I want this technology it is going to be years most likely before I have a device that can use it. So they are pushing any possible sale to me out by a long time. On the other hand if the card is compatible with what I have already, even with reduced performance, there is some chance I buy one immediately.

I don't agree with this strategy but it makes good business sense. Hell they don't even provide OS upgrades for most smartphones.

I don't think it is good business at all. It think it is a very short sighted strategy that has been tried before and usually fails.

And the lack of OS upgrades is one of the big reasons why I tend to shy away from most Android devices (with some notable exceptions). While there is a lot I like about Android better than iPhones, Apple at least continues to support their products after you buy them which matters to me at least. (Given what Apple charges they damn well should support them too...)

Re:Immediate market share

[Anonymous Coward]

Android despite the lack of upgrade BS is dominating. Apple despite constantly changing standards and connectors is going gangbusters. why sell storage when you can sell a device AND storage. The reality is keeping it compatible doesn't boost sales, it might make customers happy but it really isn't a good business strategy unless you are making a massive premium in the consumable accessors which you aren't going to do in storage.

Re:Immediate market share

[drinkypoo]

What possible incentive is there for them to make it backwards compatible.

Selling cards to the owners of the millions of devices that already exist.

They are already doing that. As literally the only vendors which give a shit about random write performance, they are selling Evo+ cards left and right to the kind of people who are in the market for a faster storage card.

Even if I want this technology it is going to be years most likely before I have a device that can use it.

So in short, it will be years before they sell you one anyway. So that circles around to why should they care about you?

I'm absolutely certain that they are going to sell a certain number of these cards to OEMs as a replacement for eMMC, which is getting a bit long in the tooth. They're not going to have any trouble moving units.

Re:Immediate market share

[sjbe]

Android despite the lack of upgrade BS is dominating.

"Dominating"? Android is moving a lot of units but they are doing so by selling them (many of questionable quality) basically at cost or below. Apple has the vast majority of the profit in the industry both in Apps and hardware sales. Except for Samsung, nobody involved in Android is making much profit except maybe app vendors. Part of this comes from not bothering to give a shit about Android user's post purchase. If you're fine with that then go for it. Obviously many people don't care and even more don't know that they should care. If that is what you want to call dominating then fine but Android isn't in any danger of pushing Apple out of the market so it's an odd definition of domination.

Apple despite constantly changing standards and connectors is going gangbusters.

Constantly changing standards? Apple has changed their iPhone connector basically once and that was long overdue. Apple has introduced a few unusual connections (Firewire, Thunderbolt) but they've kept the dominant standard ones (USB, etc) while doing it.

The reality is keeping it compatible doesn't boost sales

Your evidence for this is what exactly? Are you seriously claiming that the fact that Firewire sold like shit had nothing to do with it's incompatibility with USB? Are you seriously claiming that Sony's futile attempt to cram MemoryCard down our throats had no effect on sales of memory cards? Standards matter and generating unnecessary new ones is economically stupid in most cases. Having a single standard results in lower unit costs, higher unit volumes and (generally) reduced complexity. Most new standards prove to be expensive failures.

Re: Immediate market share

[Anonymous Coward]

"Having the most profit" translates as "takes the most money away" from the customer. Customers figure things like that out eventually.

Of course with Apple products it's more a matter of conspicuous consumtion. Expensive hard shell cases with a big cutout so the bitten apple logo is showing, etc.

Re:Immediate market share

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure what you mean. Most of my devices got updates 2 years out, and a large chunk of the built in software / OS is *STILL* updated through the Play Store even if major firmware updates are out on my Android 4.2 Galaxy Nexus (this includes WebView componenets, which third-party apps rely on to provide in-app browser). I'm also guaranteed to get ALL of the functions of a major OS update should the hardware provide it. Failing that, there are several very stable (CyanogenMod) custom firmwares should the manufacturer stop for whatever reason (and for those not technically inclined, there are services that will do it for you that you can pay a little bit for -- you know, because it's your device as you bought it. They don't have a problem with third party repair shops)... plus I can move if I feel the manufacturer is really dropping the ball and not lose any investment. I also don't have to worry about app developers fighting over the 30% tax for in-app payments and having their apps yanked for no reason.

Compare and contrast to i devices: ever slowing devices as the OS is updated far beyond what the hardware can handle (mostly because of cheaping out on hardware. I have 2GB and my S5 is now 3 years old. i devices finally caught up with a 3 year old phone! yay!!!), random features left out (there is no reason asides from raping the customer's wallet why S iri was not made available to everyone; the app it was based on was available all i devices).

So yeah, not going to touch i devices with a 10 foot pole.

Re:Immediate market share

[dave420]

So it is dominating, just not by the rules you personally require for something to really be dominating.

Re:Immediate market share

[freeze128]

Apple has changed their iPhone connector basically once and that was long overdue.

...And it's *STILL* not a Micro USB connector - despite every other phone in the market has one. (Think Different Indeed!)

Additionally, as a big F*** YOU to everyone who thinks Apple should use a Standard connector, they put a USB-C connector on the Macbook Air, but since there is only the one, they REQUIRE a dongle to use any USB device while charging.

This is proof that Apple knows what we want, and is purposely *NOT* giving it to us.

Re:Immediate market share

[Anonymous Coward]

Constantly changing standards? Apple has changed their iPhone connector basically once and that was long overdue. Apple has introduced a few unusual connections (Firewire, Thunderbolt) but they've kept the dominant standard ones (USB, etc) while doing it.

I'd like to note for the record that Apple gave stewardship of FireWire to the IEEE (1394), and anyone can implement it (e.g., Sony who called it i.Link); it's used in aircraft as well.

Also, Thunderbolt is actually run by Intel. The fact that no one else puts in their system / motherboards is not Apple's problem. It's actually a pretty good system, and really should be used more (hopefully it will now that USB-C 3.1 can use the exact same port).

Re:Immediate market share

[PRMan]

I have gotten at least 4 upgrades to my Android OS on my phone in a year and a half.

Re:Immediate market share

[thegarbz]

I don't think it is good business at all. It think it is a very short sighted strategy that has been tried before and usually fails.

Ask yourself why that business model fails. Ask your PATA harddisk, your ISA slot, even your old CF card (which admittedly is still used in high end SLRs but while you're asking about those ask why is the CF card still used there).

Many standards stand up on openess attractive licensing and technical benefits. Nothing more. The strategy that has failed in the past has usually been due to one of those three, not due to the fact that it's a competing standard in a saturated market.

If it can provide benefits otherwise not possible it may win.

Re:Immediate market share

[Agripa]

I'd like to note for the record that Apple gave stewardship of FireWire to the IEEE (1394), and anyone can implement it (e.g., Sony who called it i.Link); it's used in aircraft as well.

Was that before or after Apple killed Firewire by demanding per port fees?

Re:Immediate market share

[rocket rancher]

What possible incentive is there for them to make it backwards compatible.

Selling cards to the owners of the millions of devices that already exist. Providing an upgrade path will keep people using your standard. By not making it backwards compatible there is a strong risk it will fail to be adopted.

true enough. But what if people *aren't using* the storage they already have, which I would argue is exactly the case with the vast majority of people with cell phones. Your argument loses most of its strength. phones are for entertainment, and entertainment devices don't need hundreds of gigabytes of fast local storage. I suspect the average user not only doesn't know the storage capacity of their phone, they don't care, as long as they can continue to do what they are doing, which is stream music and movies, and play Angry Birds. My friend just bought his daughter a refurbished 2013 Motorola that streams all her music and movies and only cost him $15. Why does she need a storage upgrade path? What does fast local storage give her that cloud storage doesn't?

They want to sell and obsolete as many devices as fast possible, one way to do that is with constantly changing and evolving the standards ensuring enough improvements to make a replacement desirable

If they want to sell more cards and hardware, keeping it compatible is the fastest way to do that. Even if I want this technology it is going to be years most likely before I have a device that can use it. So they are pushing any possible sale to me out by a long time. On the other hand if the card is compatible with what I have already, even with reduced performance, there is some chance I buy one immediately.

they don't want to sell more hardware, they want to keep selling hardware. a subtle but important distinction that I think you are losing track of. and by selling, I mean renting. Much better (read: more profitable) to sell the same hardware over and over and over again, than trying to convince a consumer to buy something new. Look how Cisco had to take extreme measures to remain competitive with their own damn products because people saw no need to upgrade to Cisco's latest and greatest. You couldn't buy a new Cisco router 15 years ago unless you agreed to destroy your current one. being on the cutting edge of technology is a fun, wild ride, but it is not a good business strategy for either the technology companies or their customers. you and I may be motivated to have cutting edge tech (you should see my gaming rig!) but most people are not going to buy a product just for bragging rights.

I don't agree with this strategy but it makes good business sense. Hell they don't even provide OS upgrades for most smartphones.

I don't think it is good business at all. It think it is a very short sighted strategy that has been tried before and usually fails.

And the lack of OS upgrades is one of the big reasons why I tend to shy away from most Android devices (with some notable exceptions). While there is a lot I like about Android better than iPhones, Apple at least continues to support their products after you buy them which matters to me at least. (Given what Apple charges they damn well should support them too...)

The holy grail for hardware companies is hardware lock-in, which is the hardware analog for the subscription model that software companies have managed to force onto the software market. As long as consumers can say they own the hardware, technology companies are going to have to compete with each other to get their hardware into consumers' hands. And they don't want to have to compete -- that cuts into profits. Better to carve up the market with an agreement (tacit or otherwise) among all the players. It took Microsoft thirty years to finally adopt the closed garden approach that Jobs (marketing guy) advocated fo

Is it needed?

[Diac]

Other than in the professional occupations is there really any need for a new format that is only 5x faster? Does the current top transfer speed cause latency with the devices that use it? Other than a speed increase is there anything else different that means we need to make obsolete all the microsd format and switch to this new one?

Re:Is it needed?

[drinkypoo]

Other than in the professional occupations is there really any need for a new format that is only 5x faster? Does the current top transfer speed cause latency with the devices that use it?

Yes.

Other than a speed increase is there anything else different that means we need to make obsolete all the microsd format and switch to this new one?

Only a 5x speed increase? Is that all?

Seriously, perspective, get some. Consider history. Realize that your questions are beyond ridiculous.

Re:Is it needed?

[Blaskowicz]

It might be more reliable, and also can be used for both removable and fixed storage.

Re:Is it needed?

[Shinobi]

A new Nikon DSLR body with this storage would make me as a hobby photographer happy since it'd make it easier to capture RAW sequences at high resolutions.

Not much faster than products on sale now

[Anonymous Coward]

My SanDisk Extreme USB memory stick is rated to read at 245MB/s and write at 190MB/s. In real life performance, it comes pretty close. $20 from Amazon.

a selling point?

[CrimsonAvenger]

So, you can read a movie file (an hour or so of video) in 10 seconds, which is vastly better than the inferior older standards which take almost a minute...

Somehow, I'm not seeing myself losing sleep worrying about my inferior older devices....

Re:a selling point?

[Anonymous Coward]

SD cards cannot cope with the upcoming CCD devices. A better tech is required for 4K media, particularly recording. Come back in four years with your Luddite attitude and see where we are, eh? No doubt you're still championing VHS as good enough with shitty CRTs with convergence issues.

Re:a selling point?

[cdrudge]

Those minutes add up when you're transferring files on and off of a memory card from a camera, camcorder, or similar portable device with potentially large amounts of data.

Re:a selling point?

[JoeMerchant]

So, 4K - and what's the compression factor? Anyway, 4K is only 4x as many pixels as 1080p... If a movie is 2 hours long, we're currently reading/recording it at 120x real-time. Will the resolution/data rates be increasing 120x any time soon? Maybe for full volumetric high res 3D data sets... but not this crappy stereo-vision stuff they're selling as 3D now.

Re:a selling point?

[Blaskowicz]

One issue is copying music files on low end SD. It's slow and there's a small pause between small files, so figure copying 2000MB at something just over 2MB/s, while waiting so you can leave.

It might be a better idea to try higher end SD but that doesn't come free.

Re:a selling point?

[Overzeetop]

Sure they do, but this isn't even twice as fast (write) as UHS-II cards that already exist, and which are backwards compatible with (slower) interfaces. The spec for USH-II goes to 312MB/s each way - faster than the write speed of this new option, and a bit over half the sequential read. And older uSD are compatible with the UHS-II readers. https://www.sandisk.com/home/m...

Re:a selling point?

[cdrudge]

The spec for USH-II goes to 312MB/s each way

No, the spec says the BUS SPEED is 312MB each way. Actual read/write performance is up to the chip and is no where near that speed based on any real world review I could find. It's no different than trying to find a HDD or SSD that can transfer at 6gbit/second SATA-III speeds. It just doesn't exist (yet).

Re:a selling point?

[Anonymous Coward]

SD cards have in excess of 10 times the bandwidth required to store 4k h.264 video in realtime. If you don't want lossy then it's not quite enough to store raw 4k in realtime, but it's plenty if you use lossless compression.

Re:a selling point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only LUDDITES like YOU use CCD and 4k! Modern app appers use appy APP apps!

Apps!

Re:a selling point?

[Dracos]

What's the fucking point of 4K media on a 6 inch screen (or on a 10 inch screen for that matter)? You can't distinguish that many pixels in such a small space.

Re:a selling point?

[SScorpio]

Real world performance of SATA III is around 600MB/s. My several years old Samsung EVO4 hits 520MB/reads. There are even faster drives that do make out the full bandwidth provided by SATA III.

There are PCI-E SATA drives that were made to go over the SATA 3.0 bandwidth limitation. And there is also the SATA 3.2 spec that goes up to 16Gb/s.

Re:a selling point?

[AK Marc]

You can record on the small device and playback on a larger one. I play from a 5" screen to a 50"+ screen all the time. Much better than reformatting a video for each device it's on.

Re:a selling point?

[willy_me]

But that is due to power concerns. USH-II and UFS will both have the same problem because they both have the same form factor and basic signaling standards.. It will be a while before the benefits of a new bus can be realized when working with uSD sized cards. I assume most people will value power efficiency over speed so I would not expect this to make a difference any time soon. But if Intel's new memory works as advertised it might change things.

Re: Is it needed? Yes there is

[Anonymous Coward]

Android is geting better support to offload appstore to the external Card and The SD cards we have today is noticable much slower the internal flash. This will erase much of the difference

a solution in search of a problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pointless.

And i'm also guessing... very expensive.

Linux support

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh goodie. Will Linux still use all RAM and go to swap and grind to a halt if I copy a 50GB file to this thing?

Re:Linux support

[Guybrush_T]

Nonsense. http://www.linuxatemyram.com/

Re:Linux support

[Anonymous Coward]

The AC parent is right and you are wrong. In many default configurations, the kernel likes to blow up the cache to excessive sizes even at the cost of paging out applications. The kernel by default prioritizes throughput over latency - good for server workloads, bad for interactive use.

Just thinking

[lapm]

Just wondering, why do i need to move that movie in 10 sec if it takes me two hours to watch anyways?

Re:Just thinking

[dfghjk]

You don't but the content creator does. You think that a movie leaps out of a camera fully formed?

Re:Just thinking

[drinkypoo]

Just wondering, why do i need to move that movie in 10 sec if it takes me two hours to watch anyways?

Because you're about to get on the train to work, and you'd like to have something to do while you're there, and if it takes ten minutes to copy then you might as well just phone in late. Just because you aren't running into the limitations of current flash memory doesn't mean nobody else is.

Re:Just thinking

[damnbunni]

Because you shot 100 hours of video and want to copy it off the card quickly.

Re:Just thinking

[MobyDisk]

How else will I catch-up on my Netflix queue? I think it already exceeds my expected remaining lifespan.

Re:Just thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

...because moving the movie and watching the movie are 2 separate actions, nor are they performed in parallel. When you copy a movie that's organizational work that doesn't have entertainment value. Anything that reduces organizational work is good.

Are you new to the world?

Removable storage that never gets removed

[sjbe]

The way I (and I suspect many) people use SD and especially micro SD cards is kinda fire and forget. In other words, there's some device that needs one, so I decide what size I want and shove it in there. Mostly it remains there for the life of the device.

In some cases that is correct which of course raises the question of why you need to complexity of removable storage if you never plan to remove it. I see people complain about this in regards to certain smartphones (looking at you Apple) but I think Apple and you are correct that in 99% of the cases the removable storage adds complexity and cost for a feature that never gets used. Most of my staff at work has Android phones of one type or another and I can say confidently that none of them ever remove their removable storage cards even when they've bothered to install one.

The only piece of removable storage I use with any regularity is the SD card in my good camera. SD cards (and CF) are not going to be replaced in cameras any time soon so this new standard provides zero benefit to me. Occasionally I use a USB memory stick and similarly USB isn't going anywhere. I just don't see the point of this thing.

So again what is the point of developing yet another removable card hardware standard without making it compatible with what we already have? I'm excited about stuff like USB-C because it eliminates complexity (or will in due time). I want some really well designed standards that last a long time and that work gracefully with older hardware. I have zero use for an incompatible standards cash grab that doesn't work with any hardware I own or am likely to buy.

Re:Removable storage that never gets removed

[serviscope_minor]

In some cases that is correct which of course raises the question of why you need to complexity of removable storage if you never plan to remove it.

I sometimes upgrade, which involves removing it. The thing is what do you do with the old card? I dn't really have a long chain of devices to pass the cards on to.

Re:Removable storage that never gets removed

[tomhath]

SD cards (and CF) are not going to be replaced in cameras any time soon so this new standard provides zero benefit to me

Existing SD cards are fast enough and have enough capacity for cameras, so yes, a UFS card won't be useful in the camera you have.

But new devices and applications will arrive in a few years that will require high speed and very large capacity. We just don't know what those devices are. Yet. I'm guessing virtual reality and AI will be involved somehow, and maybe even cold fusion (but that's a long shot).

Re:Removable storage that never gets removed

[drinkypoo]

In some cases that is correct which of course raises the question of why you need to complexity of removable storage if you never plan to remove it.

Because the best-laid plans of mice and men oft gang agley. What if I run out of space and need more? What if my device dies, and I want to rescue my data?

So again what is the point of developing yet another removable card hardware standard without making it compatible with what we already have? I'm excited about stuff like USB-C because it eliminates complexity (or will in due time).

What if I just want to get all the data off my device quickly, and it doesn't support USB 3.1 type C? I just got my first motherboard which even supports that.

Re:Removable storage that never gets removed

[peppepz]

I see people complain about this in regards to certain smartphones (looking at you Apple) but I think Apple and you are correct that in 99% of the cases the removable storage adds complexity and cost for a feature that never gets used.

In the case of the iPhone 6S, Apple want from you 749 $ for the 16 GB version and 849 $ for the 64 GB version. Therefore they charge you approximately 2.08 $ per GB. You can buy a cheap UHS class1, 64 GB microSD from Samsung for 21 $ (0.32 $ per GB) or a faster UHS class 3 one from SanDisk for 40 $ (0.63 $ per GB). Moreover, the replaceability of a microSD card means that you don't have to shell more money up front for a bigger device, and you can spend them later if and when the need arises.

So not putting a card slot isn't something that Apple do to reduce the costs for the consumers, they do it to rape their wallets.

Re:Removable storage that never gets removed

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Both are good guesses, but I'd want my Raspberry Pis and similar devices to have something more capable as well.

Re:Removable storage that never gets removed

[Blaskowicz]

It's trivial enough to use a thumb-drive sized USB reader that makes it a thumb drive, to use on arbitrary hardware like desktops and laptops.
A stash of old SD would serve me, currently. I've put a debian CD on my USB drive : I had to use dd, else the installer couldn't read the drive it launched from. So over 90% of the space is wasted and I'm out of a USB drive.

Now, what if we fast-forward several years and you find yourself putting a UFS card into such a thumb drive reader : unless the card is garbage, it should be very decent and reliable enough to run a desktop OS from (be it bare metal or a VM). You can already use the best USB 3 drives for that but they vary a lot (in performance or protocol) so it's better to look for a specific model. You can just use half-decent SD too but better keep things simple (like debian and lxde, ext2 noatime, no swap)

Re:Removable storage that never gets removed

[wbo]

SD cards (and CF) are not going to be replaced in cameras any time soon so this new standard provides zero benefit to me,

Except that SD cards are not nearly fast enough for current high megapixel cameras when shooting using RAW. Many higher end cameras have abandoned CF and SD cards and have moved to using XQD due to needing continuous write speeds of 400 MBps or more.

A camera that shoots RAW files around 80 MB (which is what the current crop of high-resolution cameras do - such as the Nikon D800, Canon 5DS, and Sony a7rii) needs at least 400 MBps to maintain a 5 fps burst without needing a very large buffer. Some professional cameras can do up to 10 fps bursts which requires even higher speeds.

Re: Removable storage that never gets removed

[Bing Tsher E]

Its also about control. Apple wants its customers to put music onto their Apple gadgets through iTunes, which is controlled by Apple. It isn't like my Android tablet where I can throw, a full season of video as mp4 files onto a flash card, plug it in, and I'm good. With Apple you can't have flash cards full of video to swap into the tablet when you want to watch some particular program. It all has to go through the Apple gatekeeper.

Re:Removable storage that never gets removed

[Anonymous Coward]

Existing SD cards are fast enough and have enough capacity for cameras, so yes, a UFS card won't be useful in the camera you have

LOL.

Try taking 10+ pics/second in 4k on an SD. For 20 seconds. No SD can keep up with top end *current* cameras. The SD cards are THE limiting factor for what they can do right now.

Re:Removable storage that never gets removed

[sjbe]

So not putting a card slot isn't something that Apple do to reduce the costs for the consumers, they do it to rape their wallets.

I don't recall saying anything about any savings being passed on to customers. Do not confuse cost to the manufacturer with the price they charge. Those are unrelated. Apple can decide to charge any price they feel appropriate from zero to infinity and anything in between. But since they aren't likely to charge less than what it costs to make the lower bound on the cost will generally be the cost to make the device. The cheaper this is the lower the minimum possible price can be.

In any case your cost argument fails to consider the cost of putting the removable storage hardware on the device itself. It's not just the cost of the SD card. You have the cost of the SD card reader, the cost of the engineering and testing to put it on the device, the cost of the warranty claims that will result, the cost of the more complex assembly, the cost of marketing and support, etc. You haven't considered any of those costs and they are very real. The device manufacturer in general will have to pass on these extra costs. Now in the case of Apple they seem to have just kept the savings but nevertheless there was a savings realized by eliminating a feature that pretty much only geeks like us on slashdot actually care about. Android device makers tend to sell their devices for lower margins but they could lower them still more by eliminating the removable storage.

Re:Removable storage that never gets removed

[Anonymous Coward]

You're seriously trying to compare an SD card to internal storage? Really? Even as an Android user I can see this is a sad joke and the only way you got modded up was because you were making a slight at Apple.

Re:Removable storage that never gets removed

[Immerman]

Wipe it and sell it, donate it, or stick it in the phone of one of your less geeky friends for brownie points?

Seeing how as flash has a very finite lifespan it's also nice to be able to replace it once it's worn out. Though there's probably not a lot of people who write enough data to their phone to wear out the flash.

Upgrades are my big reason for making sure I have an SD slot as well - a new giant SD card is going to be dirt cheap long before I feel the need to upgrade my phone on its other specs.

Re:Removable storage that never gets removed

[Archangel Michael]

You can get the Nexus 6P for $649.00 for 128 GB Storage. So, less money than 16 GB iPhone.

IMHO this is like saying you want to be raped, just not in the ass, and then getting raped in the ass anyway and then whining that being raped in the ass wasn't what you wanted, but at least he was cute.

Re:Removable storage that never gets removed

[Tourney3p0]

What's the point? Depends on if you're the company or the consumer. From the consumer's perspective, the difference between 16 GB and 32 GB in SD card form is only a few bucks. From the company's perspective, the difference between 16 GB and 32 GB of hard wired storage is hundreds of dollars.

Re: Removable storage that never gets removed

[Anonymous Coward]

So you are burning threw 2GB in a second.

I can't imagine you could take many pictures at that rate.

Re: Removable storage that never gets removed

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry my math was wrong. Used the wrong numbers.

450MB used per picture taken. If it's 80MB per frame @ 5 fps.

Re: Removable storage that never gets removed

[HannethCom]

You have hit the nail directly on the head for why UFS is DOA! Speed and capacity. It has the speed, but maximum storage is 256GB. This is an exact repeat of xD cards. A new, faster, lager capacity microSD spec is probably just around the corner, that will work with existing cards, making UFS a non-starter.

Re:Removable storage that never gets removed

[jedidiah]

> You're seriously trying to compare an SD card to internal storage? Really? Even as an Android user I can see this is a sad joke and the only way you got modded up was because you were making a slight at Apple.

I don't know what kind of meth you are smoking, but I use internal and external storage interchangeably on my Android devices. I am really trying to see what all the fuss is supposed to be about here. What exactly are you trying to troll about.

Re:Removable storage that never gets removed

[chihowa]

He's probably using the cheapest SD card he can find and it's slow, flaky, and says that it's 64 GB, but it's really only 8 GB. This is a real issue and has soured many people on expandable storage and even phones/brands/OSs.. The solution isn't to stop building card slots in phones, however.

Re:Removable storage that never gets removed

[Chrontius]

I know, right? That constant cavalcade of intractable security breaches requiring the replacement of perfectly good hardware, since either it’s a hardware bug (cough Qualcom cough) or just because promised software updates to patch things like Heartbleed never materialize, and with, at last estimate, thousands of malicious Google Play apps spreading rootkits, I can see how easy it is to get raped. I mean, if my alternative is paying $2/GB for flash memory, well, it’s cheaper than even the least expensive of identity fraud.

Hang on, you were talking about getting raped by Apple.

Useless units - 5GB Movie in 10 seconds?

[Overzeetop]

Why can't we just use a universal, standard unit like X so we know how many times faster than a CD it is?

Re:Useless units - 5GB Movie in 10 seconds?

[Some nick or other]

1X = 150KB/s
5GB/10s = 500MB/s = 5e5 KB/s
which gives 3333x.

Hey, you asked :)

Re:Useless units - 5GB Movie in 10 seconds?

[Anonymous Coward]

faster than a CD

Why not faster than a horse, grandpa?

Re:Useless units - 5GB Movie in 10 seconds?

[Solandri]

They did that with older CF flash cards (x32, x144, etc - same as CD speeds) and it left people asking "how many MB/s is that?"

They did that again with SD cards with "class 2, class 4, class 6, class 10" and it again left people asking "how many MB/s is that?"

And they did it one more time with newer SD cards with "UHS-1, UHS-2, UHS-3" and it again left people asking "how many MB/s is that?"

At least with this announcement, it's trivial to do some math and figure out that the card can read at 500 MB/s max. (The reason they can't just label it in MB/s is because read/write speeds differ depending on the size of the file you're reading or writing. So a speed "class" is actually less deceptive than a MB/s label.)

Re:Useless units - 5GB Movie in 10 seconds?

[thegarbz]

1. Since when is 5GB / 10s a useless unit?
2. Oooh a new standard to rule them all. You should make one.

S. Korea the new W. Germany

[Anonymous Coward]

While W. Germany influxes its immigrants bringing down the enture E.U.

Does it still specify exFAT as file system?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure the device manufacturers would also love not to have to pay Microsoft royalties for exFAT. I was nearly excited and thought they might've (finally) switched to UFS as file system as well.

Re:Does it still specify exFAT as file system?

[WorBlux]

JFFS2 would be an even better choice. Unfortunately certain venders make it really difficult to implement third-party file-system on their OS.

FTFY

[justthinkit]

at some point people will look at the 10 64GB SD cards they already have and decide they're good, thanks anyway.

at some point people will look at the 1 256GB, 2 128GB, 3 64GB, 5 32GB, 12 16GB, 7 8GB, 3 4GB and 4 1GB SD cards they already have and decide they're good, thanks anyway.

Re:FTFY

[Agripa]

at some point people will look at the 10 64GB SD cards they already have and decide they're good, thanks anyway.

at some point people will look at the 1 256GB, 2 128GB, 3 64GB, 5 32GB, 12 16GB, 7 8GB, 3 4GB and 4 1GB SD cards they already have and decide they're good, thanks anyway.

More likely they will look at their drawer full of bad SD cards and conclude these things are junk and should not be trusted. 1000 rewrites? Ha! They do not even retrain contents for more than a few months when new.

No DRM this time it seems

[GuB-42]

It seems that UFS at least gets rid of that useless DRM in SD cards.
SD means "secure digital" with "secure" meaning DRM. And not only it is an unwanted feature for most users but it also wastes a significant amount of space (10% according to Wikipedia).

I hate headlines with COULD

[Anonymous Coward]

It could replace this or that, or you know, it might not.

The vendor HOPES it replaces it. We'll just ignore the existing devices that support only microSD.

Real world usage

[sjbe]

Because the best-laid plans of mice and men oft gang agley. What if I run out of space and need more? What if my device dies, and I want to rescue my data?

How likely is that? You have been backing up your data right? If you run out of space on most devices (smartphones, etc) it's not that hard to offload some of the data to elsewhere. You're basing your thesis on a bunch of unlikely hypotheticals that are easily mitigated in other ways. I got worked up about Apple eliminating removable storage until I realized that I never once had ever removed it on any phone I had ever owned. I looked around and almost nobody else did either. So I got over it. All it was doing was adding cost and complexity without providing a real world benefit to all but a tiny handful of people. Don't get me wrong, I get that removable storage can be hugely useful for the right person in the right circumstance. But I remain unconvinced that many of the devices that have it really need it given the use cases they are applied to.

What if I just want to get all the data off my device quickly, and it doesn't support USB 3.1 type C?

Define "quickly". Even USB 2.0 is pretty darn fast. Also how often do you really need to get "all the data" off a device quickly? Are we still solving hypothetical problems that rarely occur in the real world?

Re:Real world usage

[drinkypoo]

What if my device dies, and I want to rescue my data?

How likely is that?

It's happened to me several times, though not so much any more since we got out of the Palm Pilot era. Luckily I only broke the screens of my Palm devices, and they didn't have much data on them obviously.

What if I just want to get all the data off my device quickly, and it doesn't support USB 3.1 type C?

Define "quickly". Even USB 2.0 is pretty darn fast. Also how often do you really need to get "all the data" off a device quickly?

Any time I want to back it up. I like to take full device backups. When I transfer them off of my phone, I take the uSD card out and put it in a reader, and transfer the data off intact.

"UFS" is taken . . .

[msk]

. . . pick another abbreviation for your product.

Re:"UFS" is taken . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the way things stand over yon, the "dev" bunch will be only too happy to forget all about UFS in favour of the most recent fad, ZFS. Sure, it's all-singing all-dancing, the way they're worshipping it, it's very much a fad and a hype. FFS, I say. FFS!

Re:"UFS" is taken . . .

[freeze128]

Don't get me started on PS2....

No good reason

[sjbe]

But new devices and applications will arrive in a few years that will require high speed and very large capacity. We just don't know what those devices are. Yet. I'm guessing virtual reality and AI will be involved somehow, and maybe even cold fusion (but that's a long shot).

First off, what does removable storage have to do with any of the things you mentioned? Cold fusion? Seriously?

In any case make a storage standard that is backwards compatible with current standards. There is no reason this thing couldn't share the same form factor and work (slowly) in slots for SD cards. They made it incompatible for no reason that benefits customers. Honestly from what I can see so far I hope it dies off quickly.

Re:No good reason

[tomhath]

First off, what does removable storage have to do with any of the things you mentioned? Cold fusion? Seriously?

Same as removable storage has to do with a telephone, camera, or music player. And the cold fusion part was a joke that whooshed right over you.

In any case make a storage standard that is backwards compatible with current standards.

They don't want you to add storage to an existing device. They want you to buy a shiny new device every couple of years.

Re: No good reason

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, not whoosh nor a joke. If you thought it was funny, it was just you.

New notification

[poisonborz]

Sony likes this.

SD cards can handle 4K video

[sjbe]

Try taking 10+ pics/second in 4k on an SD. For 20 seconds. No SD can keep up with top end *current* cameras. The SD cards are THE limiting factor for what they can do right now.

I can do 4K video at 30fps on my Sony A6300 camera on an SD UHS III card. Works fine. You might want to actually check your facts. And my camera is no where near the most capable one out there.

Re:SD cards can handle 4K video

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he screwed up. 4K is actually a really shit resolution - it's onlly 8MP. What he meant to say was: try taking a 22MP file (around 5-6MB JPEG or 25-30MB RAW) at 10 fps for 20 seconds. At 4k, that would be the equivalent of around 30fps for JPG or 200fps for RAW.

Rest my case

[sjbe]

It's happened to me several times, though not so much any more since we got out of the Palm Pilot era.

So basically you're saying you haven't had to do it in the last decade. I think I can rest my case.

Re:Rest my case

[drinkypoo]

It's happened to me several times, though not so much any more since we got out of the Palm Pilot era.

So basically you're saying you haven't had to do it in the last decade. I think I can rest my case.

You fail at reading comprehension. I've only had to do it twice in the last decade. Since I buy devices with removable storage, though, no problem.

UFS is needed

[Gravis Zero]

For the unaware, SDHC maxes out at 32GB. You then have the option of using SDXC which maxes out at 2TB but there is a problem, SDXC specification mandates the use of exFAT which [surprise!] is restricted by patent by Microsoft. What this means is that memory controller may be optimised for exFAT I/O modes which may result in undefined behavior or brick it if you decide "i'll just format this to EXT4". UFS on the other hand, does not specify even needing a filesystem, so it's more like a SSD than a memory card.

Nothing to be Seen

[Anonymous Coward]

All the new spec does is improve the damn speed but if it had specified a new form factor such as PicoSD and used RFID to transfer data, then it would be worth something. Otherwise, as stated, all that's happened is they've boosted the speed but to me, is it backwards compatible with my phone/tablet/what-ever using micro-sd cards?

Samsung is a US spyware shop now

[Anonymous Coward]

Avoid.

progress

[Anonymous Coward]

Samsung has unveiled the world's first UFS card that could one day replace microSD cards in devices.

Great. Another incompatible storage card standard... Just what everybody was asking for.

It's not proprietary, but run by JEDEC, if that's what you're getting at:

The proposed specification is supported by leading firms in the consumer electronics industry such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronics, Samsung, Micron, SK Hynix.[4] UFS is positioned as a replacement for eMMCs and SD cards.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Flash_Storage

SD has been around for many years, but with SDXC / UHS-II, it's basically runs its course and getting more and more difficult to move forward.

Yes, it sucks that you'll have to replace things, but it will be over time and gradual. It's not like there's a flag day when all old stuff stops working.

I'm sure it has all sorts of lovely features but is it really too much to ask for the designers of this shit to think about future proofing their designs as well as backwards compatibility?

SD cards have been around since 2000 (16 years now):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_Association

I think that's a pretty good run. And it's not like they're completely going away, but UFS is the way forward, and it's nice that there's a transition period.

8+fps at 6000x4000

[sjbe]

I think he screwed up. 4K is actually a really shit resolution - it's onlly 8MP. What he meant to say was: try taking a 22MP file (around 5-6MB JPEG or 25-30MB RAW) at 10 fps for 20 seconds.

Same Sony A6300 camera can take 24megapixel jpegs ( 6000x4000 - about 25MB in size each) at a rate of 8-11fps. I haven't tried doing it for 20 seconds straight but it certainly can do it for a while because I've done it. It is limited by buffer size but in practice it hasn't been a problem yet. It also can capture 4K video at 100Mbps. And again there are some far more capable cameras out there. Mine is just a decent little enthusiast camera and not even particularly expensive.

exFAT requirement weakened SDXC

[mister_playboy]

Besides the technical issues with exFAT, implementing it also comes with with the requirement of paying Microsoft royalties. That has done a lot of damage to the SDXC format by inflating the price of all SD cards larger than 32GB and encouraging many devices to stick to only supporting SDHC even though the SDXC spec is now more than 7 years old.

NO NO NO

[darkain]

NO NO NO, JUST NO. PLEASE DON'T CALL IT THAT. We already have UFS as "Unix File System" for a storage technology. At least when other acronyms are reused, they're at least slightly different technology. Now the same acronym is used for both the physical and logical layers of storage, just a generation or two apart? NO!

fast

[Anonymous Cow Ward]

I read pretty quickly, but I have to say, I'm excited that this card will make me read much faster. 5 GB in 10 seconds is a lot - I'll get so much more reading done!

Uhhh... 250GB?

[DMJC]

Seriously? so these cards only go upto 250GB, meanwhile SDXC goes upto 2TB and currently has 200GB cards on the market?? GG with that.

I hope they standardize on an open file system

[steveha]

A UFS device is just a flash drive device so it will be possible to use any file system, but I'm wondering what the de-facto standard will be. If I buy a camera with a UFS slot, what file system(s) will the camera be able to use? If I buy a UFS card, what will it be pre-formatted to?

History suggests that they are most likely to license NTFS from Microsoft, since Windows is so hostile to open file systems. But I can dream and hope that they will standardize on something open, and just provide some sort of drivers or custom app for accessing the cards on Windows.

How about Samsung's own F2FS? (Already contributed to Linux!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2FS

Re:I hope they standardize on an open file system

[shutdown -p now]

UDF? Works out of the box on Windows, Linux, OS X.

Re:I hope they standardize on an open file system

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought UDF was just for optical media. But I read through this Wikipedia entry, and perhaps the "plain build" mode would work for flash media.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format

Almost certainly F2FS would be better, though. Designed for flash media, and not designed two decades ago.

Re:I hope they standardize on an open file system

[shutdown -p now]

UDF is ultimately just a filesystem. It's tailored to optical media, yes, and it's suboptimal for other formats, but it can be formatted and used that way; and when you need large files or Unicode names on portable media, and want it to be usable across platforms out of the box, it's pretty much the only choice right now. Conveniently, both Windows and OS X will mount such media just fine with no additional actions requires, although formatting in UDF is another matter. So this has been a little-known trick that has been in use for a while now.

https://j0nam1el.wordpress.com...

The only catch is that existing flash media is usually explicitly optimized for FAT. Formatting them to something else can result in lower speed, and faster wear.

You're not in the market, but

[Chrontius]

On the contrary, for people who just want a lightweight Facebook-machine, the Macbook is a boon.

You may not be in the market for one, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for one.

If you want a Macbook Pro, get a Macbook Pro.

at 256 gb with the write speed

[Anonymous Coward]

it seems like it could be used as a swappable ssd replacement for an OS - which is actually really cool