Samsung ushers in the era of the 1TB smartphone

Those rumors that Samsung's Galaxy S10 might come with a 1TB storage option may just be true.

Samsung announced on Tuesday that it's started to mass-produce its 1TB Universal Flash Storage (eUFS), the type that'll be used in smartphones of the future.

It took Samsung just four years to bring eUFS from 128GB to 1TB, the company said in a press release, while keeping it tiny enough to use in a smartphone.

For an idea of just how much storage this is, Samsung says it'll be enough to store 260 10-minute 4K videos. While that actually doesn't sound that amazing, Samsung points out that your typical 64GB smartphone can only store 13 such videos.

The new chip is not only more capacious than previous versions, it's also faster. Transfer speeds on the 1TB eUFS 2.1 reach 1,000 MB/s, which is roughly twice the sequential read speed of your typical 2.5-inch SATA SSD, and 10 times the speed of a typical microSD card. Random read speed has also improved by 38 percent (compared to the 512GB eUFS), making it 500 times faster than a "high-performance microSD card".

For most users, 1TB storage on a smartphone might seem like overkill. But for certain types of power-users it'll be very welcome. If you're serious about video, for example, the ability to store more 4K videos and handle them faster will be a life-saver. Be warned, though; 1TB smartphones likely won't be cheap, at least until they become more commonplace.