Seeking to replace microSD with a faster successor, Samsung announces world's first removable UFS memory cards, but no devices support them yet
James Vincent / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
Samsung's removable UFS card push is the next step in a strategy it started months earlier, when it announced 256GB NAND chips using the UFS 2.0 interface for phones and tablets. The move targets microSD directly: same removable form factor, but built on the faster embedded standard Samsung already ships inside its own devices.
The catch is the chicken-and-egg problem the headline makes explicit — no devices support the cards yet, so the format lives or dies on whether phone makers adopt it. The related coverage shows both paths forward: Samsung scaling UFS itself through mass production of 512GB eUFS 3.0 chips, and the SD camp answering years later with the much faster SD Express spec.
First-order effects
- Buyers of these first removable UFS cards have nothing to put them in — until handset makers add support, the product is a specification demonstration rather than a market.
Second-order effects
- microSD's incumbent steward answers on speed rather than ceding the slot: the SD Association later unveils SD 8.0 with SD Express cards reaching 3940 MB/s via PCIe 4.0, forcing device makers to choose between two high-speed removable standards.
Third-order effects
- Samsung's own trajectory suggests where the volume actually went: it scaled embedded UFS (512GB eUFS 3.0 in mass production by 2019) and then UFS 4.0 with double the speed of UFS 3.1, leaving removable-card adoption uncertain while the SD camp modernizes its own spec — a split that risks fragmenting removable storage into two incompatible ecosystems.
The trend: Removable storage is splitting into two competing high-speed camps — Samsung's UFS cards versus the SD Association's PCIe-based SD Express — as smartphone flash speeds outgrow legacy microSD.