Samsung Begins Mass Production of 512GB EUFS 3.1 | Hacker News Reader

Samsung Begins Mass Production of 512GB EUFS 3.1

news.samsung.com

122 pointsoedmarap39 comments

Am I the only one who thinks that microSD cards, and by extension EUFS cards, are too small? It's very easy to lose a microSD card. I thought the original SD form factor was good.

MicroSD is good for phones. Outside of a phone, keep your microSD in an SD adapter case or even a larger tray.

How often do you handle them? I like them the size they are because in my experience I only really handle them when I get a new phone. For something I touch less than once a year, I'd rather they be as small as possible so they don't have to bulk up my devices.

So, this is the first I've heard of UFS, and I'm wondering... what's with the fish fin on the cards?

If the point is to prevent it being accidentally inserted in a microSD slot, couldn't they have just used a slightly different size, like a millimeter wider, and keep a rectangular shape?

It keeps microSDs from fitting into a UFS only slot. They won't work in a microSD only slot because the data pins are moved to a new row.

> It keeps microSDs from fitting into a UFS only slot.

Did you mean that backwards? If a microSD doesn't have fins and the slot has additional space for fins, how would it prevent the insertion?

The fins coincide with the notches on the microSD. Tray type slots can have a UFS only outline. Those without a tray will need a barrier that only permits the rounded fin to enter.

https://www.lovemysurface.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ufs...

Oh! Looking at them side-to-side like that, it makes a lot more sense.

Being visually distinctive is important, no?

Well, I assume the front of UFS cards would say "UFS" instead of "MicroSD", and the back would look different because of the pins.

Also, having a rectangle of different dimensions would also be visually distinctive, and I think that's always been the standard way to differentiate. That's how one has always been able to differentiate between CompactFlash (CF), Memory Stick PRO, Memory Stick PRO Duo, SecureDigital (SD), etc.

Why is there now a need to have non-rectangular cards with a weird organic shape on it?

EDIT: I see now that the fin is not like an appendage added to the microSD form factor, but rather a subtraction from its shape. The form factor makes a lot more sense after seeing the image shared by kevin_thibedeau.

The shape of MicroSD cards are presumably also covered by design patents from the SD Association.

The design and dimensions are similar out of an intent to enable UFS/MicroSD combo receptacles (which all UFS receptacles currently available are).

How do they manage the heat at these speeds? I've seen even MicroSD get ouchingly hot.

I would guess a better manufacturing process and smaller components lead to better energy efficiency and less heat dissipation.

So what does this mean to a grandfather with an iPhone?

I don't think Apple uses UFS storage on a iPhone. They do their own thing.

I wonder where's Apples bottlenecks are.

Transfers with USB-C cables takes ages (USB2).

AirDrop occasionally removes live photos, converts into different formats and is very manual step. Sometimes it's fast, sometimes it's not.

iCloud works so-so. Order of magnitude slower when compared with Google Photos. MacOS support is barebones. Trying to export one photo occasionally takes minutes or fails quietly.

Apple has a full-blown SSD controller with NVMe storage in the iPhone.

And last I knew, it’s the same controller they use in Macs.

I clicked on the link expecting that EUFS 3.1 was some new piece of medical equipment that could speed up Covid-19 testing. I guess I get my nerd card taken away for not knowing my acronyms (and ignoring the "512GB" part).

The world didn't end. If you expect every single news article to be about the disease, you need to step away from the news for a while.

1GB/sec?

Why does it (still) take over an hour to copy 100GB of photos and videos off my phone?

Every time it seems like a nightmare because I don’t want to use some weird sync, or convert the files as they copy, or store the photos inside an Photos.app container....

I just want the damn files copied onto my NAS where I know they’re safe and automatically mirrored on Backblaze.

Been doing it for 10 years now and still a painful and slow manual process. Most recently when I tried, I had to give up trying to do it on a Mac and move to a PC where I could see the individual files and copy them out of each folder and then delete them as a separate step. I can’t be the only one tearing hair out over this...

They make it hard so you give up and subscribe to their cloud storage offering.

Yes. It's also why all Macs still don't have greater than 128gb hard drives even when nvme has gotten considerably cheaper.

I probably will not buy another Apple product until MacOs gets phased out and IpadOS becomes their new platform.

Right now you can buy a 13" MacBook Pro, customized with 16GB memory, 2TB SSD.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch-space...

I realized I mis-spoke. I should've said the base models.

You may want to double check that. Base MacBook Airs comes with 256gb

Likely due to a much slower USB controller on the phone as well as the overhead of having to convert between multiple types of file systems and data transfer protocols.

Note that 1GB/sec is all of a 10 gigabit ethernet line. You probably have, at most, 1Gb between your phone and your NAS if you are using 802.11AC. So 100MB/sec or one tenth that speed for you, maybe much less.

That said, if your NAS had a UFS slot you could 'sneakernet' the chip from the phone to the NAS and clone it then pull it out and put it back in your phone. That could conceivably happen in just a few minutes if your NAS CPU and IO system could keep up.

No word on their write endurance that I saw.

It's weird how lagging home 10GbE is, given it's so old tech now and the adults have had 40/100Gbe for 7-ish years. Anyone know how much you have to pay for a 10 GbE NAS appliance?

(Not that I'd get a NAS appliance on my net anyway, they all seem to be gaping security holes and generally give a crap-IoT or crap-enterprise vibe - the role is well served by x86 hw + normal OS options)

You can get cheap refurbished 10GbE cards on eBay. I got a couple of Mellanox ConnectX-2 cards for like $30 or so and get 1.1GByte/s without tuning between my NAS and my Win10 desktop PC.

The MikroTik CRS305-1G-4S+IN is a relatively cheap 4 port 10GbE switch.

You can get a brand new Mellanox card for $210 from their website, shell out $215 and you can get 25G ethernet. It's not really that much to pay once you consider it an expensive component (like a NVMe drive) rather than something that's virtually free (like a 8GB flash drive). The sad truth is that a 10G NIC is something that requires a reasonable amount of modern silicon to produce, so it's not going to be cheap (yes they were producing them back in the 130nm era but that was an act of insanity).

You need quite spiffy hardware to get useful utilization of a 25G connection though, it's ~3GB/s after all. For me the 10G cards are plenty, given that my NAS is all spinning rust.

My challenge is finding 10GbE switches for a reasonable price.

I just learned what this obscure piece of technology called sneakernet is and now I see it everywhere.

“Packet collisions sucked when you were on a sneakernet.” — Anon

“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway,=.” — Andrew S, Tanenbaum

Haha are you me? I moved back to PCs because of the same issue. Time Machine doesn't cut it and the pushes apple have been making have just made making a logical backup system nigh impossible.

rsync works on MacOS

What are you copying them with?

What are you copying them to?

If it's Android, the bottleneck will be MTP if you're using a USB cable. Also, if your phone uses USB 3, make sure it's actually running at USB 3 speeds.

I would imagine you're not creating 100gb of changed data every day on your phone.

cheaper smaller faster: pick 2 or maybe 1

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