- Sep 4, 2013
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So, I've been seeing the official reveal of the Samsung Galaxy A8 (and what a looker it is!) and in the comments, there were (unsurprisingly), a lot of people complaining about how the cheaper A8 has expandable storage but the flagship S6/S6E doesn't. I mean, surely it's as simple as drilling a slot into the side of a phone for an SD card slot like HTC and Sony, right?
Well, not exactly.
For a phone's internal storage to work, it needs to communicate with a memory controller, as it manages the flow of data to and from the phone's internal storage. And yes, that counts for SD cards too. Now, as many of us know, the Galaxy S6 uses a new type of internal storage medium called UFS 2.0, also known as Universal Flash Storage 2.0. UFS 2.0 promises much better speed, stability and AFAIK, efficiency as well. Pretty great, right? But that doesn't explain why there's no SD card support, right?
You're right. That doesn't. Now, what I've been hearing is that if Samsung were to add SD card support, it would bottleneck the speed of the phone's internal storage. That's plausible*. While we haven't tested how the speed of UFS 2.0 would be affected by a microSD card, my personal conclusion is that since people mainly store media files on SD cards and apps on internal storage, the performance bottleneck would be a non-issue and from my personal experience, SD cards don't have a noticeable impact on the phone's internal storage speed performance. In short, speed isn't the reason why there's no SD card support on the S6. The reason is below.
Remember when I said that for internal storage and SD card to work with a phone, it needs to communicate with the memory controller? Well, the memory controller used by UFS 2.0 is obviously different from the one used by eMMC. The memory controller used by eMMC can be utilized by both eMMC internal-storage and microSD card without any extra controllers. Unfortunately, UFS 2.0's memory controller apparently doesn't natively support microSD cards. Meaning that if Samsung had to add microSD card support, they would either have to find a way to have the memory controller work with SD cards, design a whole new memory controller or add 2 memory controllers, all of which are very time consuming, difficult and in the case of the latter, makes a dent in the phone's battery life. Note that that may not always be the case, since Gator352 pointed out that most memory controllers are part of the SoC, so it might be a little easier that described, but time will tell.
So, that's your answer right there. So, is microSD card support coming for devices with UFS 2.0? I'm currently not so sure but I'm hoping that they're making SD cards work with them. Fingers crossed.
* - Can someone more experienced in storage hardware clarify this? Thanks.
(If you're interested in the storage performance of eMMC, check out the 2 screenshots below. The left is the LG G4 running a stock ROM while the right is the HTC One M7 running a custom ROM. Both use different types of eMMC AFAIK.) If you have an S6, you can test it out.
Well, not exactly.
For a phone's internal storage to work, it needs to communicate with a memory controller, as it manages the flow of data to and from the phone's internal storage. And yes, that counts for SD cards too. Now, as many of us know, the Galaxy S6 uses a new type of internal storage medium called UFS 2.0, also known as Universal Flash Storage 2.0. UFS 2.0 promises much better speed, stability and AFAIK, efficiency as well. Pretty great, right? But that doesn't explain why there's no SD card support, right?
You're right. That doesn't. Now, what I've been hearing is that if Samsung were to add SD card support, it would bottleneck the speed of the phone's internal storage. That's plausible*. While we haven't tested how the speed of UFS 2.0 would be affected by a microSD card, my personal conclusion is that since people mainly store media files on SD cards and apps on internal storage, the performance bottleneck would be a non-issue and from my personal experience, SD cards don't have a noticeable impact on the phone's internal storage speed performance. In short, speed isn't the reason why there's no SD card support on the S6. The reason is below.
Remember when I said that for internal storage and SD card to work with a phone, it needs to communicate with the memory controller? Well, the memory controller used by UFS 2.0 is obviously different from the one used by eMMC. The memory controller used by eMMC can be utilized by both eMMC internal-storage and microSD card without any extra controllers. Unfortunately, UFS 2.0's memory controller apparently doesn't natively support microSD cards. Meaning that if Samsung had to add microSD card support, they would either have to find a way to have the memory controller work with SD cards, design a whole new memory controller or add 2 memory controllers, all of which are very time consuming, difficult and in the case of the latter, makes a dent in the phone's battery life. Note that that may not always be the case, since Gator352 pointed out that most memory controllers are part of the SoC, so it might be a little easier that described, but time will tell.
So, that's your answer right there. So, is microSD card support coming for devices with UFS 2.0? I'm currently not so sure but I'm hoping that they're making SD cards work with them. Fingers crossed.
* - Can someone more experienced in storage hardware clarify this? Thanks.
(If you're interested in the storage performance of eMMC, check out the 2 screenshots below. The left is the LG G4 running a stock ROM while the right is the HTC One M7 running a custom ROM. Both use different types of eMMC AFAIK.) If you have an S6, you can test it out.
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it wouldn't be hard.
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