Samsung opens terabyte era for smartphone storage capacity

The 1 terabyte (TB) era has opened for internal memories of smartphones as well. Samsung Electronics announced Wednesday that it will mass produce the world's first one-terabyte (TB) embedded universal flash storage (eUFS) from this month.

1TB is a large memory that can store 260 10-minute videos in ultra-high definition (UHD 3840x2160) in a flagship smartphone. This means that people can use their smartphones as a premium laptop computer without adding an external memory card.

To double the capacity of the previous version, Samsung's 1TB storage chip combines 16 stacked layers of the most advanced 512GB V-NAND flash memory and a newly developed proprietary controller. It will allow users to download 5GB-sized full HD videos to an NVMe SSD in as fast as five seconds, which is 10 times the speed of a typical microSD card.


Ji-Hyun Kim jhk85@donga.com