Samsung debuts first 1TB storage chip for smartphones, likely destined for Galaxy S10

Ben Schoon | Jan 30 2019 - 6:58 am PT

As our smartphones become more central to our digital lives, storage becomes more and more important. This week, Samsung is debuting the first 1TB storage chip designed for smartphones, and it’s likely going to arrive in a coming Galaxy S10 model.

Samsung announced today that it has kicked off production on the first eUFS storage chips for smartphones which offer a full terabyte of storage. The chip measures the same 11.5mm x 13mm as Samsung’s other storage chips, and works by “combining 16 stacked layers of Samsung’s most advanced 512-gigabit (Gb) V-NAND flash memory.”

This new storage chip is also the fastest mobile storage option Samsung currently offers. Where the 512GB eUFS has a read speed of 860 MB/s and write speed of 255 MB/s, this 1TB option hits 1000 MB/s for read speed and 260 MB/s for write speed. Samsung says that this allows files, specifically 5GB video files, to be offloaded to an NVMe SSD in as little as 5 seconds – 10x the speed of a high-performance microSD card.

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that it has begun mass producing the industry’s first one-terabyte (TB) embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) 2.1, for use in next-generation mobile applications. Just four years after introducing the first UFS solution, the 128-gigabyte (GB) eUFS, Samsung has passed the much-anticipated terabyte threshold in smartphone storage. Smartphone enthusiasts will soon be able to enjoy storage capacity comparable to a premium notebook PC, without having to pair their phones with additional memory cards.

As recent reports have hinted at, it’s very likely that the top-end model of Samsung’s new Galaxy S10 family will offer this as a storage option. Likely sold for a crazy price and in limited quantities, this model would come with the 1TB of storage paired with a whopping 12GB of RAM, possibly only in the larger Plus variety.

The Samsung Galaxy S10 family will be revealed on February 20th.