Samsung bringing 128GB internal storage to mid-range smartphones

The Samsung Galaxy S6 packed in more internal memory than any other Samsung handset before it. The company wants to bring 128GB of storage to mass market smartphones as well and has just announced a new 128GB, 3-bit per cell NAND memory chip designed for this market segment.

However, this memory module won’t be built from the same UFS 2.0 standard as the fast memory found in the Galaxy S6. Instead, Samsung’s mid-range high capacity memory will be designed to the eMMC 5.0 standard, which is still ample for the vast majority of situations.

The new Samsung 128GB eMMC 5.0 chip delivers 260 MB/s for sequential data reads. Random data read and write operations reach 6,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) and 5,000 IOPS, respectively, which is just fine for the likes of high definition video processing.

See below for a quick general comparison, although individual chips may, and in this case do, vary from specification maximums.

The main benefits of faster UFS memory come when reading or writing large chunks of data with minimal latency, such as recording and processing high resolution slow-motion video content, which is probably outside the capabilities of most mid-range smartphones anyway. Even though the new memory may not be on the cutting edge, the extra space is bound to come in handy to store larger apps and plenty of media.

Samsung is ramping up its component development operations this year, in order to pull ahead of the competition and offset the decline in smartphone sales. Higher density memory for a broad range of devices could result in large orders from competing mobile manufacturers.

Samsung has not announced when it will be releasing its 128GB memory chips for more affordable smartphones.