Samsung rolled out new MicroSD playing cards on the finish of February, and whereas that is not noteworthy by itself — the Korean model is among the largest producers of SD playing cards — the brand new playing cards are fairly totally different. They use the SD Specific normal and go as much as 800MB/s in sequential reads, and that is greater than what you get with SATA SSDs.
Hardwired
In Hardwired, AC Senior Editor Harish Jonnalagadda delves into all issues {hardware}, together with telephones, storage servers, and routers.
Crucially, the usual is almost eight instances sooner than 104MB/s that was doable with UHS-I playing cards, and 312MB/s with UHS-II. The SD Specific MicroSD playing cards begin at 256GB and go as much as 1TB, and so they use Samsung’s V-NAND tech, which is analogous to what the model makes use of in its common SSDs.
Clearly, there’s lots to love with these playing cards, even if you happen to low cost Samsung’s claims about facilitating on-device AI. However the largest downside with the SD Specific normal is that it hasn’t made any mainstream headway although it has been round for the higher a part of a decade, and that’s unlikely to vary.
What’s extra related right here is that MicroSD playing cards are unusable on the finest Android telephones; certain, Samsung nonetheless makes just a few mid-range Galaxy A telephones which have an MicroSDXC slot, however that listing is getting shorter with each technology. All telephone producers moved away from the usual on their flagships, and for good cause — although SD Specific has heady positive factors over UHS-I, it does not maintain a candle to UFS 4.0 storage.
All flagships launched in 2024 characteristic UFS 4.0 storage, and the usual goes as much as 4,000MB/s in sequential reads — 5 instances that of SD Specific. Micron simply rolled out new UFS 4.0 modules which are miniscule whereas delivering 4,400MB/s sequential reads, and UFS 5.0 is on the horizon.
Telephone producers used eMMC storage for a number of years, and as the usual wasn’t noticeably sooner than prevalent MicroSD playing cards, they’d no points providing expandable storage on their units. However as UFS storage began gaining momentum almost a decade in the past, they’d a dilemma: the usual delivered efficiency that was just like NVMe SSDs, considerably outmatching MicroSD.
Manufacturers may proceed to supply MicroSD slots on their units, however that will have meant a noticeable distinction in efficiency between the onboard storage and expandable modules, or eschew the port altogether — which is what we ended up with. This example is not going to vary with the introduction of sooner MicroSD playing cards; manufacturers stand to make rather more cash by upselling customers to purchase higher-storage variants of telephones.
I like the concept of expandable storage; I take advantage of all of the M.2 slots on my gaming machine, I slotted in a 2TB SSD within the PlayStation 5 to reinforce the restricted storage out there on the console, and put in a 2TB M.2 2230 SSD within the Steam Deck as quickly as I bought the hand held. However I by no means felt the necessity to take action on a telephone — although it will make transferring information to a brand new gadget lots simpler.
That is the second a part of why most telephones haven’t got MicroSD card slots: reliability. I’ve had just a few cases prior to now the place MicroSD playing cards failed, and I finally ended up shedding the info saved on these playing cards. So once I bought the LG G4 a decade in the past, I made a decision to not hassle with MicroSD playing cards in any respect and began backing up the info on my telephone to exterior sources — Google Pictures on the cloud, and a NAS inside my residence community.
Until a greater normal comes alongside, it is unlikely telephone producers will think about providing expandable storage on their units. Even then, I doubt most manufacturers will care; ports are at a premium as of late, and iPhones do not even have SIM card trays (fortunately solely in North America). Given the state of UFS storage and the path the trade is headed in, expandable storage is not making a comeback.
