Samsung’s UFS 4.0 is two times faster than its current storage

It’s also far more efficient

Samsung unveiled Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 3.1 in 2020, positioning it as the storage technology to take full advantage of the newly introduced 5G tech. It featured reasonable improvements in performance and efficiency over the preceding UFS 3.0 and has ever since been the standard for Android smartphones. However, that’s about to change as Samsung has announced its new UFS 4.0 with massive gains over its predecessor.

Samsung says UFS 4.0 received approval from the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) board of directors, a global group that develops open standards for microelectronics. It’ll offer faster storage that doubles the last generation's sequential read and write speeds, boasting up to 4,200MB/s and 2,800MB/s, respectively. The company attributes this jump to its advanced 7th-generation V-NAND and proprietary controller under the hood.

UFS 4.0 is also expected to consume less power and improve battery life, with a 6.0MB/s per mA sequential read speed. Samsung says it delivers a massive 46% improvement over the previous generation. It’ll offer a vast bandwidth of up to 23.2Gbps per lane, which makes this perfect for 5G compatible phones.

Improvements are not limited to internal components, though. Samsung has reduced the external dimensions, with the UFS 4.0 measuring 11 x 13 x 1mm for 1TB of storage space. In comparison, a 512GB UFS 3.1 module has dimensions of 11.5 x 13 x 1mm.

Mass production for the UFS 4.0 is expected to begin in the third quarter of 2022, which is right on time for its Galaxy S23 series launch next year. It’s also likely that the new tech could be used in Samsung’s next foldables later this year, but we’ll have to wait and see how that plays out.