We can find this term Universal Flash Storage in the specifications of Smartphones but usually, anyone doesn't know the real meaning of UFS and it's a real-life application. So in this article lets understand what is Universal Flash Storage, its standards and what it means for us the normal consumers.
What is Universal Flash Storage(UFS)?
Universal Flash Storage (UFS) is a flash storage specification for digital cameras, mobile phones, and consumer electronic devices. It aims to bring higher data transfer speed and increased reliability to flash memory storage while reducing market confusion and removing the need for different adapters for different types of card. We can find Universal Flash Storage being used in almost all flagship and mid-range smartphones like Samsung Galaxy Note 9 or even the mid-range Realme 2 Pro.
Advantages of UFS Storage & what it means for a normal day to day user
Essentially, UFS makes any task requiring memory access that little bit faster. Memory bandwidth is very important for recording high-resolution video content and other memory intensive reading or writing tasks, which are becoming increasingly common operations in mobile devices. Downloading data through a fast WiFi or USB connection and installing apps can also be bottlenecked by slow memory, but UFS’s scalable 6GBps bandwidth should overcome this issue.
Samsung claims that data transfer times between PC and mobile can be reduced by 50 percent compared with eMMC, and UFS can provide about a 60 percent reduction in latency compared to eMMC if app swapping is supported by the host. With networking speeds constantly increasing, UFS is a more futureproof solution for mobile products.
The Battery Consumption also reduces significantly as compared to a microSD Card or an eMMC storage. Just like MicroSD cards UFS based cards are also available in the market but most smartphones don't support them
The UFS standard has been developed by the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association. The way UFS works is by offering high-performance benefits of the SATA interface used in PCs combined with the flash-optimized low power consumption of eMMC. Also, unlike previous storage standards such as eMMC and ePOP, the UFS is based on the SCSI architectural model and supports SCSI Tagged Command Queuing, which allows the operating system to send multiple reads and write requests to the storage.
UFS features anLVDS (Low-Voltage Differential Signaling) serial interface, that has separated dedicated read and write paths.UFS has a full-duplex interface that allows for simultaneous read and writes, at the same time.
Universal Flash Storage Version or standards comparison
UFS
|
1.0
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1.1
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2.0
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2.1
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3.0
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Introduced
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2011-02-24
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2012-06-25
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2013-09-18
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2016-04-04
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2018-01-30
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Bandwidth per lane
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300 MB/s
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600 MB/s
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1450 MB/s
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||
Max. number of lanes
|
1
|
2
|
|||
Max. total bandwidth
|
300 MB/s
|
1200 MB/s
|
2900 MB/s
|
||
source:-Wikipedia
UFS vs eMMC
The UFS boasts of significant improvements in performance over the previous standard for storage, eMMC (embedded Multi-Media Controller). UFS features anLVDS (Low-Voltage Differential Signaling) serial interface, that separates dedicated read and write paths. Basically, while eMMC has a half-duplex interface that only allows either read or write, UFS has a full-duplex interface that allows for simultaneous read and writes, at the same time.
Furthermore, UFS also has a Command Queue (CQ), which effectively sorts out all the operations and/or commands to be carried out. What this means, is that multiple commands can be addressed at the same time and the order of tasks can be changed accordingly, in real time. On the other hand, eMMC, which does not feature CQ, needs to wait for a process to be completed before moving on to the next one. All of this helps UFS kick the eMMC storage right off the park.
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