Samsung has introduced a brand new standard in portable removable storage. The new UFS cards have been launched specifically to cater for high-resolution mobile shooting, and will be the perfect SD replacement for devices like DSLRs, 3D VR cameras, action cams and drones. Although they look similar to microSD, they're much, much faster. 

UFS (Universal Flash Standard) can achieve read speeds of 530 megabytes per second, over five times faster than the typical microSD cards. In fact, comparatively, its read speed is more similar to an external SSD drive than a memory card.

What's more, it can achieve write speeds up to 170 megabytes per second, or double the high end microSD card speeds. 

For photographers, all this means that burst photo shooting should be much quicker since the thumbnail loading time and buffer clearing time are much shorter. Samsung says its UFS card can shoot 24 large JPEG photos continuously with a high end DSLR in less than seven seconds, whereas the fastest microSD would take around 32 seconds. 

“Our new 256GB UFS card will provide an ideal user experience for digitally-minded consumers and lead the industry in establishing the most competitive memory card solution,” said Jung-bae Lee, senior vice president, Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering, Samsung Electronics “By launching our new high-capacity, high-performance UFS card line-up, we are changing the growth paradigm of the memory card market to prioritize performance and user convenience above all.”

Samsung uses a lot of technical terms in its press release, but it essentially boils down to the fact that UFS easily outperforms microSD, and is even a strong enough solution that it could potentially kill the need for bigger portable hard-drives. 

The Korean tech giant has been working on its UFS standard for some time, and introduced an embedded version of the chip last year. What's more, it's the first memory card to fully comply with the UFSA's (Universal Flash Storage Association) certification program and will be licensed to other manufacturers so that competitors can build their own UFS cards.

In time, this will become the universal memory card standard used industry-wide, or at least, that's the hope.