Samsung has started mass production of new embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) chips, which should bump up the storage capacity of future smartphones to a more capacious 512 GB. The chips can reportedly double the density of storage in the same amount of physical space as the previous unit.
Samsung has been producing V-NAND devices for the last few years, which are three-dimensional stacks of flash storage chips. This newest device is made up of eight 64-layer V-NAND chips and a controller chip, which will boost the storage capacity of the eUFS up to 512 GB. That's twice the storage capacity of the previous model, which contained 48 layers.
For reference, Samsung says a user could store about 1,300 minutes of 4K video on a device built with the new eUFS, which is about 10 times more than can be crammed onto a Samsung Galaxy S8.
The new eUFC can also read and write faster, with its sequential read speeds peaking at 860 MB/s, and write speeds of up to 255 MB/s. According to the company, that means a 5 GB video file could be transferred to an SSD in about six seconds. The power management technology in the new device has also been updated, in order to keep the increase in energy consumption to a minimum.
Samsung says it plans to aggressively produce these new 512 GB V-NAND chips to cover demand, as well as stepping up production of the existing 256 GB model.
Source: Samsung
