What you need to know about USB 3.0 storage?
Smartphones have undergone significant improvements and changes over the past decade. At one time, the first telephones did not have cameras. Today, one phone has at least three camera modules, all with different functions and zoom. But have you ever wondered what happens behind the scenes in the memory of your smartphone, tablet or digital camera? For most people, this is not a priority until they run out of storage space.
Fortunately, the performance of this vital component achieves the same gains as charging methods, and today high-performance smartphones are already using the Universal Flash Storage (USB ) standard.
USB is a storage standard designed to provide ultra-fast read and write speeds for smartphones and digital cameras, among other mobile devices with lower power consumption during operation. The benefits of UFS can be experienced when you are taking photos, filming videos, or accessing data in your device’s internal storage, as you will enjoy fairly fast speeds and longer battery life.
Ultimately, USB aims to replace the built-in MultiMedia Card (eMMC) flash drives currently used in many cameras, smartphones and tablets. UFS is much faster than eMMC storage, in part due to the exchange of information with the host device.
Conventional embedded flash solutions and flash memory cards process one command at a time, limiting random read / write performance. However, USB has higher sequential and random read / write speeds because it adopts the SCSI and SCSI Tagged Queuing architecture model, so it can send multiple requests at the same time.
It comes in options such as removable cards similar to microSD cards, or much less commonly built-in internal storage (eUSB ). The latter was first adopted by the Samsung Galaxy S6 and can be used on many other Android flagships and subsequent Samsung premium devices.
What is USB 3.0?
In January 2018, JEDEC introduced the UFS 3.0 standard, which increases bandwidth and doubles the transfer rate while reducing system power consumption. A year later, with the arrival of the OnePlus 7 Pro, there is new information on this new storage standard.
UFS 3.0 is similar to SSD technology for phones and digital cameras, which isn’t listed as other specs, but can have a huge impact on your device’s performance. It’s much faster than UFS 2.1, much faster than other memory standards like eMMC, and will deliver super speeds up to 23.2Gbps while lowering power consumption. This means you can even shoot 4K or 8K video at a higher frame rate.
Benefits of USB 3.0
UFS 3.0 offers several benefits, including:
- Faster read / write speeds, greatly improving multitasking capabilities
- Lower power consumption
- Longer battery life
While USB 3.0 offers fast read and write speeds, how you feel about it depends on what you do with your smartphone. We would all like our apps and games to save and load quickly. Likewise, with the rise in popularity of 4K video recording and 8K on the horizon, USB 3.0 will prove to be a useful feature, although it may not be needed for now.
So far, very few flagship phones like the Samsung Galaxy Fold, One Plus 7, and OnePlus 7 Pro support it. It will be some time before it rolls out to mid-range phones as smartphones become more powerful and networks become more reliable and faster.