All you need to know about UFS 3.0 is here
Universal Flash Storage, known simply as UFS is the storage specification for portable devices like cameras, phones, consumer electronic devices. First published in 2016 by JEDED, UFS has reached version 3, its most powerful specification to date. If you are wondering who is using UFS 3.0, OnePlus 7 Pro is going to come with UFS 3.0.
With so many applications continuously hitting phone storage, a super fast and powerful storage is required. Another aspect of phones that need high speed storage is 4K video recording and viewing. When you record a video in 4K resolution, you are writing enormous amount of data to your phone storage. One minute of 4K video takes around 400MB of storage space. If the storage is slow, you end up with hung camera application and video player that gets stuck waiting for data. What happens when you have a 4K video getting recording and you have these background applications like twitter and facing pulling stories and feeds and writing to your phone. What if you are downloading some update while recording a 4K video? You do not want your phone to hang up, do you? Modern games read and write crazy amount of data and having a high speed and low latency storage helps faster loading and smooth gameplay.
UFS is tailor made for mobile applications and computing systems that need powerful and fast. UFS storage is becoming more and more popular not only because of its speed and bandwidth, it consumes very less amount of power. The JEDEC Solid State Technology Association is an independent semiconductor engineering trade organization and standardization body that works on and develops UFS standard. With UFS 3.0, 2900 MB/s bandwidth is available for phone applications and that is truly mindblowing.
Back in July 2016, Samsung brought out world’s first UFS cards (32GB to 256GB storage capacities). These storage cards offered sequential read performance up to 530MB/s and sequential write performance up to 170MB/s.
Today, UFS 3.0 is available for use but there are only two smartphone chipsets that are capable and support UFS 3.0. Those are Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 and Exynos 9820. You now know where OnePlus 7 Pro fits in. Powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 855, the OnePlus 7 Pro will come with UFS 3.0 internal storage and we expect extremely fast performance. The following table shows how drastic performance improvement UFS 3.0 has when compared to 2.1.
| UFS | 1.0 | 1.1 | 2.0 | 2.1 | 3.0 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Introduced | 2011-02-24 | 2012-06-25 | 2013-09-18 | 2016-04-04 | 2018-01-30 |
| Bandwidth per lane | 300 MB/s | 300 MB/s | 600 MB/s | 600 MB/s | 1450 MB/s |
| Max. number of lanes | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Max. total bandwidth | 300 MB/s | 300 MB/s | 1200 MB/s | 1200 MB/s | 2900 MB/s |
| M-PHY version | 3.0 | 3.0 | 4.1 | ||
| UniPro version | 1.6 | 1.6 | 1.8 |
“UFS 3.0, UFSHCI 3.0 and the UFS Card Extension update offer a host of enhancements over the prior versions of these standards that will help product designers enable significant improvements in mobile devices and related applications,” said Mian Quddus, Chairman of the JEDEC Board of Directors and the JC-64 Committee for Embedded Memory Storage and Removable Memory Cards. He added, “The addition of features specifically for the automotive market underscores the commitment of JEDEC members to continue to evolve the UFS ecosystem to meet the needs of the industry and, ultimately, the consumer.”
