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Gizmag reports that Samsung is expected to be the first company to offer for sale a new type of memory card, Universal Flash Storage. The new cards, which follow a JEDEC standard, have the same size and shape as microSD cards but are electrically incompatible with them.
Samsung claims a "sequential read speed of 530 megabytes per second (MB/s)" and, for the 256 GB card (the largest capacity), a "170 MB/s sequential write speed" and "35,000 random IOPS." Gizmag likened the speeds to those obtainable with SSDs. Cards with capacities as small as 32 GB will be offered.
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Samsung to Offer New Type of Flash Memory Card
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(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday July 08 2016, @03:05AM
As I understand it, UFS cards will indeed fit in a microSD slot and will not work with devices designed only for microSD. Upcoming hardware will have a single slot in which both types of cards will work. Isn't that preferable to needing distinct slots? I would assume the pin-out was changed for reasons, but I don't know what they might be.
Wikipedia has a page (begun in 2007!) about the standard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Flash_Storage [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 08 2016, @04:05AM
Yes, it is, but the normal solution is to add a tab to the new flavor that stops it fitting in the old slots, but the new slots, with a cutout for that tab, will accept both flavors. Then you don't need distinct slots, but without creating the "fits, but doesn't work" problem.
That said, it appears from the pictures in TFA as though they actually did it right, and TFS has oversimplified it. The shape pictured is not the same as microSD -- not worth describing textually, just RTFA and you'll see. I assume this shape change is precisely to prevent putting a UFS card in a microSD slot.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday July 08 2016, @06:11AM
> TFS has oversimplified it.
That was my doing. The article said the UFS cards are "the same size" as microSD and I added "and shape." Thank you for the correction.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday July 08 2016, @05:00PM
Isn't that preferable to needing distinct slots?
In a perfect world, yes.
Unfortunately, in this world, the answer is no, because as soon as these become popular, everybody who's “that so smrt computer dork” will get bombarded with questions about why their laptop at home can't read their thumb drive even though it worked just fine in the office.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday July 08 2016, @09:30PM
Another poster corrected me, saying that there's a tab that will prevent UFS cards from going into a slot meant only for microSD.