Samsung Just Gave Enterprise Mobility a 256GB Boost

Datamation content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

Samsung’s enterprise-ready Galaxy S7 and S7 edge smartphones aren’t the only major mobile announcements from the Korean electronics giant in recent days.

During the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona, Spain, Samsung announced that it had begun mass producing the first embeddable 256-gigabyte (GB) chips using the company’s stacked, 3D vertical NAND technology (V-NAND) and the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 2.0 standard, the latter of which provides for input-output rates of up to 5.8 gigabits per second (Gbps). UFS is a mobile flash specification backed by Micron, SanDisk, and of course Samsung, among others.

Deleting apps to reclaim space on a smartphone or tablet may soon become a thing of the past. Currently, Apple’s own iPhone 6 and 6s top out at 128 GB. When Samsung’s Galaxy S7 and S7 edge ship next month, they will feature 32 GB of built-in storage.

And not only do the chips make it possible to design new high-end smartphones capable of handling massive files — up to 47 full HD movies — they can sling those files faster.

According to Samsung, the new, dual-lane 256 GB UFS chips can transfer data at a speed of up to 850 megabytes (MB) per second, or nearly twice as fast as the SATA SSDs used in today’s PCs. With write speeds of up to 260 MB per second, the chips can absorb data at twice the rate of micro SD cards, the company claims. Matched with USB 3.0-compliant interfaces, users will be able to transfer a 5 GB file in 12 seconds.

For business users, the new flash chips offer yet another reason to leave the laptop back at the office.

“By providing high-density UFS memory that is nearly twice as fast as a SATA SSD for PCs, we will contribute to a paradigm shift within the mobile data storage market,” said Joo Sun Choi, executive vice president of Samsung Memory Sales and Marketing, in a Feb. 25 announcement. “We are determined to push the competitive edge in premium storage line-ups – OEM NVMe SSDs, external SSDs, and UFS – by moving aggressively to enhance performance and capacity in all three markets.”

With read and write input/output operations per second (IOPs) ratings of 45,000 and 40,000, Samsung’s new mobile storage technologies offers more than twice the performance of its predecessor. For comparison’s sake, previous UFS-based flash chips were rated at 19,000 read and 14,000 write IOPS.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.