Samsung Electronics said Thursday it will start mass production of the industry’s first 256-gigabyte Universal Flash Storage from next month for smartphones, with twice the processing speed compared to conventional chips used in PCs.

The Korean tech giant, which is also the world’s biggest memory chipmaker, said the new chip will go into high-end mobile devices but didn’t name possible products and clients. 

According to the company, the chip has a reading speed of 850 megabytes per second and writing speed of 260 megabytes per second, double that of conventional solid-state drives and triple that of external microSD cards.

The 256-gigabyte UFS is expected to better support high-end smartphones that come with larger, higher resolution displays in the smallest of sizes.

The breakthrough comes in a year after Samsung launched the predecessor 128 gigabyte UFS in January last year.

“By providing high-density UFS memory that is nearly twice as fast as conventional SSD for PCs, we will contribute to a paradigm shift within the mobile data storage market,” said Cho Joo-sun, executive vice president of memory sales and marketing division.

“We are determined to push the competitive edge in premium storage lineups by moving aggressively to enhance performance and capacity.”

The new chip is based on the company’s most advanced V-NAND flash memory chips and a specially designed high-performance controller. It handles up to 45,000 and 40,000 input/output operations per second for random reading and writing respectively.

For example, the chip can store about 47 full HD films, allowing greater flexibility not just in smartphones but also in other mobile devices. 

When adopted to USB 3.0 interface, users will be able to transfer data much faster between mobile devices. It will take only 12 seconds to transfer a 5-gigabyte full-HD video, equivalent of a 90-minute movie. 

By Lee Ji-yoon (jylee@heraldcorp.com)