Although similar to microSD cards, due to the pin layout both aren’t compatible. The incompatibility issue can be forgiven in the light of their furious read and write speeds.

Although there have been innumerable arguments going back and forth for and against removal storage on smartphones, one thing everybody agrees upon is the bigger the size of the storage the better it is.

It’s not just about the capacity of the memory we are talking here, but its speed as well. This is especially crucial when you are capturing high resolution videos on drones and smartphones.

So as to specifically target this need for speed, Samsung has just announced the launch of its new Universal Flash Storage (UFS) removable memory cards. In fact the 256GB variety features an almost SSD-like read speed of 530MB/s per second. This is nearly half a GB per second and is five times faster than the read speed of the best microSD card available today.

Its write speed of 170MB per second is also blazing fast and is 2-3 times faster than the best available today.

As if that wasn’t enough, Samsung has claimed that this upcoming 256GB card is rated with a random read rate of 40,000 IOPS, i.e. 20 times faster than today’s average microSD card. Its random write speed is rated at 35,000 IOPS, i.e. 350 times faster than today’s average.

Although UFS cards closely resemble its microSD counterpart, the new pin layout means that they aren’t compatible.

However, since this is a new standard, it will take a while before it percolates down to products. Here’s hoping the upcoming Galaxy Note 7 will feature these blazingly fast memory cards.