With every flagship phone released in our modern era, it doesn't matter whether it has 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB of storage — the one thing that we expect to see is that it has UFS 4.0 storage. Why? Because that's the fastest kind of storage you can get in a phone these days, and it means opening apps and moving files is snappier.
Well, here's some very good news for those of us who are very insistent on high performance. If Samsung's roadmap pans out the way they want, we might be seeing significantly faster storage chips very soon; just in time for the release of the Samsung Galaxy S25 series.
UFS 4.0 4-Lane CS Will Double Current Speeds, May Be Around For The S25
When it comes to storage for our smartphones and tablets, we tend to think of the size first before anything else. Sure, that's the most important parameter when it comes to your phone's storage, but it's not the only important one. You've also got to think about the speed too, and when you've dealt with a phone that takes close to a minute to get past the splash screen on Candy Crush (I'm serious), you'll realize speed is important.
UFS (Universal Flash Storage) 4.0 is a storage specification with a maximum read speed of 4GB per second, which is very fast. But as humans, we are always hungry for more, and while using a phone with UFS 4.0 storage feels snappy enough, there are some apps and features that we'd love to have open a lot faster.
Thanks to a roadmap released by Samsung Semiconductor on Weixin (shoutout to SamMobile for the first report), we know how the South Korean electronics giant is planning to approach the next few generations of the UFS standard, and there's good news for a lot of us there.
Samsung's proposed UFS 4.0 4-Lane CS for 2025 will double the current speed limit from 4GB to 8GB of data each second. It'll be impossible not to notice that kind of difference. A critical application of this will be in on-device AI features as it will enable them to open a whole lot snappier (which makes them more convenient). Since Galaxy AI was a huge part of the S24 launch, it will no doubt be a focal point of Samsung's launches in the future.
UFS 5.0 Isn't Expected Until 2027 Comes Around
UFS 5.0 is a much shinier badge to wear, though, especially from a marketing perspective. Consumers might not realize the perks that come with “UFS 4.0 4-Lane CS” when compared to “UFS 4.0.” However, the same roadmap shows that we shouldn't expect UFS 5.0 to come around before 2027.
That means the earliest possible Samsung devices to come with this storage specification would be the Samsung Galaxy S27 phones, which are still quite a way off. However, we could see a major boost in storage performance as early as next year with the Galaxy S25, and that's what I'm excited about.
