14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association has been hard at work on the development of a new standard capable of pushing flash drive units forward by quite a bit in terms of transfer speeds.
Being the organization that it is, JEDEC is constantly working on new ways of boosting the storage capacity and performance of all NAND Flash-based devices.
This once, a new standard was released not for SSDs, though such products have been getting better at using the SATA 6.0 Gbps connection lately, thanks to SandForce and the likes of OCZ and Corsair.
Regardless, this once it is USB flash drives that got better, or gained a means to do so, through a standard that enables very high transfer rates.
To be more specific, JEDEC developed what is known as UFS, short for Universal Flash Storage, which describes how an USB stick may communicate in up to 300MB/s.
Among other things, it adopts the well-known SCSI Architecture model and command protocols, meaning that multiple commands and command queuing features are supported.
Nevertheless, the speed is owed to the MIPI Alliance’s M-PHY physical interface and the UniPro universal chip-to-chip protocol.
“The publication of UFS is an important milestone for JEDEC and the Industry, and represents countless hours of collaboration between memory manufacturers and principal consumer device and mobile OEMs,” said Mian Quddus, Chairman of the JEDEC Board of Directors and the JC-64 Committee for Flash Memory Modules.
“Since UFS provides for both embedded and removable card formats the interface is the same for both, which simplifies controller design – an attractive feature for device designers,” he added.
The UFS standard should prove particularly convenient for consumers that have to use mobile computing systems, since it delivers both a high performance and power efficiency.
What remains to be seen is how quick storage companies are in building on this new milestone.