UFS 5.0 Storage Is Official, and It's Almost Twice as Fast to Help Power AI

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Universal Flash Storage (UFS) is one of the key standards used to monitor device storage speed, and a new standard, announced this week, is expected to deliver a significant improvement in speed across the devices that support it.

The standard is set by the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC), which unveiled UFS 5.0 on Monday. The last big upgrade was UFS 4.0, introduced in 2022, which brought speeds of 5.8GB per second. That was followed by a minor UFS 4.1 upgrade in January. The new standard takes it up to 10.8GB per second to meet the demands of AI, JEDEC says.

"Designed for mobile applications and computing systems that demand high performance with low power consumption, UFS 5.0 plans to deliver faster data access and improved performance compared to its predecessor, while maintaining compatibility with UFS 4.x hardware," it says.

The 5.0 upgrade will "provide noise isolation between PHY and memory subsystem, easing system integration," according to JEDEC, which also confirmed it will support inline hashing for improved security of your user data and overall better signal stability.

We don't know when UFS 5.0 will appear on devices. Some manufacturers have been slow to adopt UFS 4.0. While Samsung introduced the tech in 2023, the Pixel 10 was the first Google phone to use the standard.