UFS 5.0 storage with 10.8 GB/s could make smartphones almost as quick as PCIe 5.0 SSDs

Since 2011, the industry association JEDEC has been standardizing flash storage for devices like smartphones and tablets that rely on Universal Flash Storage (UFS) instead of PCIe. UFS 4.0 was adopted back in 2022 and offers transfer speeds of 2,900 MB/s on one lane or 5,800 MB/s with two lanes. Now, UFS 5.0 is nearly final and once again promises more speed.

Specifically, JEDEC speaks of a maximum speed of 10,800 MB/s. For comparison, fast PCIe 5.0 SSDs like the Samsung 9100 Pro (from $128 on Amazon) can hit around 14,700 MB/s. While smartphones still lag behind the fastest laptops, the gap is getting much smaller. According to JEDEC, this faster storage will be necessary to meet the steadily growing demands of AI applications.

UFS 5.0 is also expected to be more reliable thanks to a signal integrity enhancement. It’s also supposed to be easier to integrate into devices due to a separate power supply for the signaling unit and storage subsystem, while inline hashing improves security. As usual, it will likely take several years for the new UFS standard to hit the mass market, and even then, UFS 5.0 is by no means a guarantee for higher storage speeds. For example, the Google Pixel 10 Pro with 256GB of storage or more utilizes UFS 4.0, but in our in-depth review, the smartphone only showed relatively slow data rates of up to 1,492 MB/s, while competitors are typically more than twice as fast.