Smartphones have fast wearing components like battery. Beside the batteries, storage units are one of the components that breaks down quickly. Older smartphones with eMMC are likely to perform much worse over a prolonged period of use. Since the phones have UFS (Universal Flash Storage) units, this isn’t as crucial as it formerly was. But there is no doubt that UFSs will have a speed decrease in read and write speed in time.
FBO in Xiaomi 12S Ultra
Toshiba and Samsung are the main companies manufacturing storage units. Xiaomi 12S Ultra will use UFS 4.0 which is very faster than UFS 3.1. Samsung claims that the new UFS 4.0 standard delivers much faster transfer speeds and better power efficiency. To be more precise, UFS 4.0 can transfer data at rates of up to 23.2Gbps per lane which is double of UFS 3.1.
Since UFS 4.0 is a new flash memory standard, the Xiaomi 12S Ultra will be one of the first smartphones to have it.
According to Xiaomi, they conducted a test on the UFS 4.0 memory to see how it would do after four years of use. The speed of UFS 4.0 decreased to 416.1 MB/s from 1924.6 MB/s after simulating 4 years of use. That is around 20% of the actual performance of UFS 4.0 in a brand new condition. Same test applied on the unit with FBO succeeded to hold at 1924.3 MB/s which is almost 0% wear which is crazy. Xiaomi didn’t clarify how they run the simulation test but we assume they did write and read speeds uninterruptly.
The technology is included in the official specification of the next generation flash memory standard UFS 4.0 and has received recognition from JEDEC (International Semiconductor Industry Standardization Association). UFS 4.0 will be accessible to the entire industry once it is put into mass production.
FBO the new storage technology will be supported by mainstream flash memory brands such as Western Digital, Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix, Kioxia, and Yangtze Memory.
