Samsung today unveiled the world’s first UFS 1.0 based microSD cards in storage capacities of up to 256GB. Samsung was the first company to debut UFS based memory on smartphones with its Galaxy S6 in 2015. 

Compared to the traditional eMMC 5.0/5.1 based storage solution and microSD cards, UFS provides a significant speed improvement that will greatly speed up day-to-day tasks. Samsung notes in its press release that a 256GB UFS removable memory card is capable of sequential read speeds of 530MB/s — significantly higher than the 95MB/s read speeds of a UHS-1 based microSD card.

Similarly, a 256GB UFS card is capable of random read rate of 40,000 IOPS, which is more than 20x higher than the 1,800 IOPS of a normal microSD card. Lastly, UFS cards are also capable of reaching write speeds of up to 170MB/sec.

“Our new 256GB UFS card will provide an ideal user experience for digitally-minded consumers and lead the industry in establishing the most competitive memory card solution,” said Jung-bae Lee, senior vice president, Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering, Samsung Electronics “By launching our new high-capacity, high-performance UFS card line-up, we are changing the growth paradigm of the memory card market to prioritize performance and user convenience above all.”

Samsung did not reveal the prices and availability information of the UFS-based microSD cards in its press release. It is likely that existing smartphones, cameras and other devices will not be compatible with UFS-based microSD cards as they will likely require a new memory controller.